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Friday post
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The American way of life was designed by white supremacists in favor patriarchal white supremacy, who have had at least a 400 year head start accumulating wealth, out of generations filled with blood sweat and tears of oppressed people. The same people who are still on the front lines and in the crosshairs of patriarchal white-supremacist capitalism today. There's no such thing as equality without a united revolutionary front to dismantle capitalism and design a worldwide socialist society.
—Johnny Gould
(Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)
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20-City PFAS Contamination Tour
The Pentagon: Exposing the Hidden Polluter of Water
Military Fire-fighting Foam that is poisoning us all!
What in the world are they thinking?
March 12, Thursday – Santa Cruz
6:00 - 9:00 pm
Resource Center for Nonviolence Auditorium
612 Ocean St. Santa Cruz
Organized by WILPF Santa Cruz Branch
March 13, Friday - Radio, TV interviews
pat.elder@civilianexposure.org
All times PST - Current Availability - 8:00 am, 10:00 am, 1:00 pm, 2:00 pm, 4:30 pm, 5:30 pm
March 14, Saturday – San José
2:00 – 4:30 pm
San Jose Peace and Justice Center, 48 South 7th St., San Jose
Organized by WILPF San Jose Branch
pat.elder@civilianexposure.org
All times PST - Current Availability - 8:00 am, 10:00 am, 1:00 pm, 2:00 pm, 4:30 pm, 5:30 pm
March 14, Saturday – San José
2:00 – 4:30 pm
San Jose Peace and Justice Center, 48 South 7th St., San Jose
Organized by WILPF San Jose Branch
March 16, Monday - Fairfield
FMI: ratherbenyckeling@comcast.net
3:00 – 5:00 pm Travis AFB, Main Gate, Fairfield
The Main Gate is located at the Visitor Control Center
Air Base Pkwy, Travis AFB, Fairfield
Planned evening event - TBA
3:00 – 5:00 pm Travis AFB, Main Gate, Fairfield
The Main Gate is located at the Visitor Control Center
Air Base Pkwy, Travis AFB, Fairfield
Planned evening event - TBA
March 17, Tuesday - Fairfield/Marysville
8:00 am Press Conference
Press Contact: militarypoisons@wilpfus.org
3:00 – 5:00 pm Beale AFB - Marysville, Doolittle and Wheatland Gates.
5:30 Peace Encampment, Informal Presentation following potluck.
Schneider Gate, (“Main Gate”) East end of North Beale Rd.
Press Contact: militarypoisons@wilpfus.org
3:00 – 5:00 pm Beale AFB - Marysville, Doolittle and Wheatland Gates.
5:30 Peace Encampment, Informal Presentation following potluck.
Schneider Gate, (“Main Gate”) East end of North Beale Rd.
March 18, Wednesday - Marysville
South Beale Rd. & Ostrom Rd.
8:00 am Press Conference
8:00 am Press Conference
Press Contact: militarypoisons@wilpfus.org
8:30 am Potluck Breakfast and Presentation at Linda/Marysville residence
Mid-day - TBD -
Mid-day - TBD -
6:30 – 9:00 pm - Sacramento
WILPF Branch Potluck Supper and Talk
Southside Park Cohousing, 434 T St,
WILPF Branch Potluck Supper and Talk
Southside Park Cohousing, 434 T St,
March 19, Thursday - Fresno
7:00 pm Fresno City College
Old Administration Building (OAB), Room 251
Campus map
March 20, Friday - Berkeley - various meetings, organizing, etc.
March 21, Saturday - Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists 6:30 doors open, 7:00 - 9:00pm
March 22, Sunday - San Francisco - The Women's Building World Water Day 12:30 doors open, 1:00- 4:00pm
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San Francisco Bay Area Anti-War Coalition
rally and a march to oppose the impending
war on Iran, demand an end to U..S.
occupation in Iraq
San Francisco Federal Building
(90 7th Street, SF, CA 94103)
Thursday, March 19th @ 5PM
Oppose U.S. Imperialism and imperialism in all its forms
Join us as we rally and march to demand an end to the U.S. occupation in Iraq and all other countries and oppose an impending war with Iran on the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, as well as the tragic commemoration of the 17th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. For decades, the United States has sought to dominate the Middle East through economic and military means. Now is the time for us to come together to start a new anti war movement within the United States that is able to put an end to the U.S. war machine once and for all! We demand:
No War on Iran
No Sanctions on Iran
U.S. Out of Iraq
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Please forward widely
The Prosecution of Julian Assange and the Fight for Free Speech
Sunday, April 19, 2:00 - 5:00 pm Humanist Hall 390 27th Street, Oakland
Donation: $20 -$10 sliding scale; Student $5, No one turned away for lack of funds
Benefit for the Courage Foundation, for Julian Assange's defense
Join us for a panel discussion of leading attorneys, human rights defenders and social justice activists as the London trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is underway. If Assange is extradicted to the United States, he faces the first-ever charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 for the publication of truthful information in the public interest. Speakers will present the ctitical legal and policy issues involved as well as rebut government efforts to undermine the reputation and credibility of Assange. In these difficult times for civil liberties and democratic rights we demand: Free Julian Assange! Defend Free Speech and the First Amendment!
Panel Speakers: Jim Lafferty, Executive Director for three decades, National Lawyers Guild, Los Angeles
Representative, Bay Area National Lawyers Guild
Jennifer Robinson, Julian Assange's London attorney (message)
Joe Lombardo, National Coordinator, United National Antiwar Coalition
Nathan Fuller, Executive Director, Courage Foundation*
Nozomi Hayase, author, contributor to the new book, In Defense of Julian Assange
Margaret Kunstler, editor, In Defense of Julian Assange (tentative)
Moderator: Jeff Mackler, author, Obama's National Security State: The Meaning of the Edward Snowden Revelations
*Courage Foundation www.couragefound.org, an international whistleblower support network, campaigning for the public and legal defense of Julian Assange and for the protection of truthtellers and the public's right to know, internationally.
Sponsors: Bay Area Julian Assange Defense Committee • National Lawyers Guild Bay Area • Courage Foundation • United National Antiwar Coalition
Initial co-sponsors: CodePink Bay Area • Social Justice Center of Marin • Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, US Section • Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance, advisory board, Courage Foundation, past Steering Committee member Chelsea Manning Support Committee, Venezuelan Embassy defender • Marin Peace and Justice Center • Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
Contact information and to co-sponsor: Event coordinator, Jeff Mackler, jmackler@lmi.net
With video messages from Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
National Solidarity Events to Amplify Prisoners Human Rights
AUGUST 21 - SEPTEMBER 9th
To all in solidarity with the Prisoners Human Rights Movement:
We are reaching out to those that have been amplifying our voices in these state, federal, or immigration jails and prisons, and to allies that uplifted the national prison strike demands in 2018. We call on you again to organize the communities from August 21st - September 9th, 2020, by hosting actions, events, and demonstrations that call for prisoner human rights and the end to prison slavery.
We must remind the people and legal powers in this nation that prisoners' human rights are a priority. If we aren't moving forward, we're moving backward. For those of us in chains, backward is not an option. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Some people claim that prisoners' human rights have advanced since the last national prison strike in 2018. We strongly disagree. But due to prisoners organizing inside and allies organizing beyond the walls, solidarity with our movement has increased. The only reason we hear conversations referencing prison reforms in every political campaign today is because of the work of prison organizers and our allies! But as organizers in prisons, we understand this is not enough. Just as quickly as we've gained ground, others are already funding projects and talking points to set back those advances. Our only way to hold our ground while moving forward is to remind people where we are and where we are headed.
On August 21 - September 9, we call on everyone in solidarity with us to organize an action, a panel discussion, a rally, an art event, a film screening, or another kind of demonstration to promote prisoners' human rights. Whatever is within your ability, we ask that you shake the nation out of any fog they may be in about prisoners' human rights and the criminal legal system (legalized enslavement).
During these solidarity events, we request that organizers amplify immediate issues prisoners in your state face, the demands from the National Prison Strike of 2018, and uplift Jailhouse Lawyers Speak new International Law Project.
We've started the International Law Project to engage the international community with a formal complaint about human rights abuses in U.S. prisons. This project will seek prisoners' testimonials from across the country to establish a case against the United States Prison Industrial Slave Complex on international human rights grounds.
Presently working on this legally is the National Lawyers Guild's Prisoners Rights Committee, and another attorney, Anne Labarbera. Members of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP), and I am We Prisoners Advocacy Network/Millions For Prisoners are also working to support these efforts. The National Lawyers Guild Prisoners' Rights Committee (Jenipher R. Jones, Esq. and Audrey Bomse) will be taking the lead on this project.
The National Prison Strike Demands of 2018 have not changed.. As reflected publicly by the recent deaths of Mississippi prisoners, the crisis in this nation's prisons persist. Mississippi prisons are on national display at the moment of this writing, and we know shortly afterward there will be another Parchman in another state with the same issues. The U.S. has demonstrated a reckless disregard for human lives in cages.
The prison strike demands were drafted as a path to alleviate the dehumanizing process and conditions people are subjected to while going through this nation's judicial system. Following up on these demands communicates to the world that prisoners are heard and that prisoners' human rights are a priority.
In the spirit of Attica, will you be in the fight to dismantle the prison industrial slave complex by pushing agendas that will shut down jails and prisons like Rikers Island or Attica? Read the Attica Rebellion demands and read the National Prison Strike 2018 demands. Ask yourself what can you do to see the 2018 National Prison Strike demands through.
SHARE THIS RELEASE FAR AND WIDE WITH ALL YOUR CONTACTS!
We rage with George Jackson's "Blood in my eyes" and move in the spirit of the Attica Rebellion!
August 21st - September 9th, 2020
AGITATE, EDUCATE, ORGANIZE
Dare to struggle, Dare to win!
We are--
"Jailhouse Lawyers Speak"
NLG EMAIL CONTACT FOR LAWYERS AND LAW STUDENTS INTERESTED IN JOINING THE INTERNATIONAL LAW PROJECT: micjlsnlg@gmail.com
PRISON STRIKE DEMANDS: https://jailhouselawyerspeak.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/prisoners-national-demands-for-human-rights/
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Courage to Resist Newsletter
 Podcast: “I would not carry a weapon anymore” – Ray Cage
Ray Cage is a combat vet and Agent Orange vet. He deployed to Vietnam in 1969 and later participated in the illegal invasion of Cambodia. "I just started to have some misgivings about what I was doing as a human being. ... There was a big movement of that going on all amongst the ranks in the war machine in Vietnam, that people were refusing to participate.” Listen to Ray's story
Appeals court heard arguments on draft registration, congressional report coming March 25th
As Congress prepares to debate the issue of the military draft, Courage to Resist and other anti-draft activists and organizations are calling on Congress to enact legislation to end draft registration entirely. Learn more
Join the Pilgrimage to Close the Camps, June 5-7, Washington DC
Courage to Resist is a proud endorser of the National Pilgrimage to Close the Camps, “A chance to join thousands of Japanese Americans and other communities for programs, protest, and healing together,” lead by Tsuru for Solidarity. Learn more
"No regrets" for resister who dumped human dung on draft files
Nearly forgotten history: At his draft board, they asked where Barry’s other ten brothers were. When Barry and his parents got home they thought about what had happened. “Oh, you mean rest, as in residue? Like what’s left behind in a bathroom stall?" The family could oblige, they decided. For the next few days, all of the brothers collected their business in a pail. Learn more
The above Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — “Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam.” This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured. If you believe this history is important, please ...
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COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
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https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/sign-the-petition-free-chelsea-manning-now?clear_id=true&referrer=group-fight-for-the-future&source=direct_link
Chelsea Manning just spent another birthday behind bars.
Sign the Petition: Free Chelsea Manning Now
Judge Anthony Trenga
In 2010, former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning disclosed earth-shattering information about the nature of asymmetric warfare and U.S.. handling of global affairs. And she paid dearly for it. Chelsea was incarcerated for years, including long stretches in solitary confinement, under conditions that the United Nations condemned as torture.
After millions of people around the world spoke out and demanded her release, Chelsea's sentence was commuted.. But the US government did not stop persecuting her.
Now, Chelsea has been back in jail for nine months, and faces nine more. Not because she has committed any crime, but because of her conscientious objection to participating in a secretive grand jury investigation into the publication of her 2010 disclosures.
Between their original forensic investigation and Chelsea's detailed statement at court martial, the government gained exhaustive knowledge about her role in the disclosures... They have no need for her testimony—they obtained at least one indictment a full year before she was called to testify before the grand jury, and disclosed another two months after she was jailed for her refusal to do so.
Chelsea's refusal to participate in this process is part of a long history of resistance to grand juries, which are routinely used to harass and entrap activists, journalists, and truth tellers. In a shocking move, the judge in the case has imposed massive fines on Chelsea, charging her $1,000 per day while the US government holds her in "coercive confinement," ostensibly to convince her to agree to their demand that she give testimony to the grand jury.
We know Chelsea Manning's name because she is a principled and fearless advocate for her beliefs. She is prepared to spend another nine months in confinement, and to bear the crushing debt of these unprecedented fines...... Senior U.....S.... officials, including the Secretary of State and the President himself have publicly expressed their hostility toward her. It could not be more clear that the government wishes to punish Chelsea further for her 2010 disclosures. It could not be more clear that she will never comply with the grand jury.
Chelsea has already served half of the 18 month maximum that the government can hold her. She's about to spend another birthday in a jail cell... The US government has no legal justification for continuing to imprison her. This must stop. Sign the petition now to send the following letter to Judge Trenga demanding Chelsea Manning's immediate release.
To: Judge Anthony Trenga
From:
Dear Honorable Judge Trenga,
I am writing to ask you to recognize that continuing to keep Chelsea Manning behind bars is both futile and cruel.. She is known to the world as a principled advocate, and everything she does and says demonstrates her strong will and commitment to her ideals. Her testimony in this grand jury is not needed, and her current incarceration appears to be an attempt to punish her further for past offenses.. As she will never be convinced to betray her principles, even by jail time or burdensome fines, her imprisonment does not serve the interests of the grand jury, the government, the court, or the law.
Please make the right decision and order her release so that she may return to her community and heal in peace.
Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives....org
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Stop Kevin Cooper's Abuse by San Quentin Prison Guards!
https://www.change.org/p/san-quentin-warden-ronald-davis-stop-kevin-cooper-s-abuse-by-san-quentin-prison-guards-2ace89a7-a13e-44ab-b70c-c18acbbfeb59?recruiter=747387046&recruited_by_id=3ea6ecd0-69ba-11e7-b7ef-51d8e2da53ef&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard&use_react=false 
On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young. The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates.. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned: "This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here .. .... . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken .... .. .. I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!" A bucket was eventually brought over and: "I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush." Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C.., that is f_cked up!" A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A... Young. Kevin has never met Officer A...... Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse... Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration. No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect................. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young.. Please: 1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.. 2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated........ 3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037 4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at: Main Street San Quentin, CA 94964 5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.......................ca.gov
On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young. The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates.. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned: "This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here .. .... . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken .... .. .. I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!" A bucket was eventually brought over and: "I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush." Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C.., that is f_cked up!" A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A... Young. Kevin has never met Officer A...... Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse... Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration. No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect................. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young.. Please: 1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.. 2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated........ 3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037 4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at: Main Street San Quentin, CA 94964 5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.......................ca.gov*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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Sign Global Petition to Dismiss Charges Against Anti-Nuclear Plowshares Activists Facing 25 Years
US ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR
This is an urgent request that you join with distinguished global supporters including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, other Nobel laureates and many others by signing our global petition to dismiss all charges against the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 (KBP7).. They face 25 years in prison for exposing illegal and immoral nuclear weapons that threaten all life on Earth. The seven nonviolently and symbolically disarmed the Trident nuclear submarine base at Kings Bay, GA on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (View KBP7 reading their statement here.....) This petition is also a plea for us all to be involved in rebuilding the anti-nuclear weapons movement that helped disarm the world's nuclear arsenals from 90,000 down to 15,000 weapons in the 1980s... We must abolish them all. The KBP7 trial is expected to begin this fall in Georgia. Time is short. Please sign the petition and visit kingsbayplowshares7.......org. Help KBP7 by forwarding their petition to your friends, to lists, and post it on social media...... The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 have offered us their prophetic witness. Now it's up to us! In peace and solidarity, The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Support Committee https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/sign-global-petition-to-dismiss-charges-against-anti-nuclear-plowshares-activists-facing-25-years?source=direct_link&
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Eddie Conway's Update on Forgotten Political Prisoners
November 19, 2019
https://therealnews........com/stories/eddie-conway-update-forgotten-political-prisoners
EDDIE CONWAY: I'm Eddie Conway, host of Rattling the Bars. As many well-known political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal continue to suffer in prison…
MUMIA ABU JAMAL: In an area where there is corporate downsizing and there are no jobs and there is only a service economy and education is being cut, which is the only rung by which people can climb, the only growth industry in this part of Pennsylvania, in the Eastern United States, in the Southern United States, in the Western United States is "corrections," for want of a better word. The corrections industry is booming. I mean, this joint here ain't five years old.
EDDIE CONWAY: …The media brings their stories to the masses.. But there are many lesser-known activists that have dropped out of the spotlight, grown old in prison, or just been forgotten.............. For Rattling the Bars, we are spotlighting a few of their stories........ There was a thriving Black Panther party in Omaha, Nebraska, headed by David Rice and Ed Poindexter...... By 1968, the FBI had began plans to eliminate the Omaha Black Panthers by making an example of Rice and Poindexter. It would take a couple of years, but the FBI would frame them for murder..
KIETRYN ZYCHAL: In the 90s, Ed and Mondo both applied to the parole board. There are two different things you do in Nebraska, the parole board would grant you parole, but because they have life sentences, they were told that they have to apply to the pardons board, which is the governor, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, and ask that their life sentences be commuted to a specific number of years before they would be eligible for parole.
And so there was a movement in the 90s to try to get them out on parole...... The parole board would recommend them for parole because they were exemplary prisoners, and then the pardons board would not give them a hearing. They wouldn't even meet to determine whether they would commute their sentence..
EDDIE CONWAY: They served 45 years before Rice died in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. After several appeals, earning a master's degree, writing several books and helping other inmates, Poindexter is still serving time at the age of 75.
KEITRYN ZYCHAL: Ed Poindexter has been in jail or prison since August of 1970. He was accused of making a suitcase bomb and giving it to a 16-year-old boy named Duane Peak, and Duane Peak was supposed to take the bomb to a vacant house and call 911, and report that a woman was dragged screaming into a vacant house, and when police officers showed up, one of those police officers was killed when the suitcase bomb exploded............
Ed and his late co-defendant, Mondo we Langa, who was David Rice at the time of the trial, they have always insisted that they had absolutely nothing to do with this murderous plot, and they tried to get back into court for 50 years, and they have never been able to get back into court to prove their innocence. Mondo died in March of 2016 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Ed is going to turn 75 this year, I think............. And he has spent the majority of his life in prison... It will be 50 years in 2020 that he will be in prison..
EDDIE CONWAY: There are at least 20 Black Panthers still in prison across the United States.. One is one of the most revered is H. Rap Brown, known by his Islamic name, Jamil Al-Amin.
KAIRI AL-AMIN: My father has been a target for many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years of the federal government, and I think him being housed these last 10 years in federal penitentiaries without federal charges show that the vendetta is still strong. The federal government has not forgotten who he was as H.. Rap Brown, or who he is as Imam Jamil Al-Amin...
JAMIL AL-AMIN: See, it's no in between.. You are either free or you're a slave. There's no such thing as second-class citizenship.
EDDIE CONWAY: Most people don't realize he's still in prison. He's serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson...
KAIRI AL-AMIN: Our campaign is twofold.. One, how can egregious constitutional rights violations not warrant a new trial, especially when they were done by the prosecution........ And two, my father is innocent. The facts point to him being innocent, which is why we're pushing for a new trial.. We know that they can't win this trial twice... The reason they won the first time was because of the gag order that was placed on my father which didn't allow us to fight in the court of public opinion as well as the court of law... And so when you don't have anyone watching, anything can be done without any repercussion..
EDDIE CONWAY: Another well-known political prisoner that has been forgotten in the media and in the public arena is Leonard Peltier. Leonard Peltier was a member of the American Indian Movement and has been in prison for over 40 years and is now 75 years old..
SPEAKER: Leonard Peltier represents, in a very real sense, the effort, the struggle by indigenous peoples within the United States to exercise their rights as sovereign nations, recognized as such in treaties with the United States.. For the government of the United States, which has colonized all indigenous peoples to claim boundaries, keeping Leonard in prison demonstrates the costs and consequences of asserting those rights.
EDDIE CONWAY: Leonard Peltier suffers from a host of medical issues including suffering from a stroke... And if he is not released, he will die in prison...
LEONARD PELTIER: I'll be an old man when I get out, if I get out.
PAULETTE D'AUTEUIL: His wellbeing is that he rarely gets a family visit. His children live in California and North Dakota. Both places are a good 2000 miles from where he's at in Florida, so it makes it time consuming as well as expensive to come and see him. He is, health-wise, we are still working on trying to get some help for his prostate, and there has been some development of some spots on his lungs, which we are trying to get resolved....... There's an incredible mold issue in the prison, especially because in Florida it's so humid and it builds up. So we're also dealing with that...
EDDIE CONWAY: These are just a few of the almost 20 political prisoners that has remained in American prisons for 30 and 40 years, some even longer. Mutulu Shakur has been in jail for long, long decades.... Assata Shakur has been hiding and forced into exile in Cuba......... Sundiata has been in prison for decades; Veronza Bower, The Move Nine........... And there's just a number of political prisoners that's done 30 or 40 years.
They need to be released and they need to have an opportunity to be back with their family, their children, their grandchildren, whoever is still alive. Any other prisoners in the United States that have the same sort of charges as those people that are being held has been released up to 15 or 20 years ago. That same justice system should work for the political prisoners also.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of Rattling the Bars. I'm Eddie Conway.....
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Letters of support for clemency needed for Reality Winner
Reality Winner, a whistleblower who helped expose foreign hacking of US election systems leading up to the 2016 presidential election, has been behind bars since June 2017. Supporters are preparing to file a petition of clemency in hopes of an early release... Reality's five year prison sentence is by far the longest ever given for leaking information to the media about a matter of public interest.............. Stand with Reality shirts, stickers, and more available. Please take a moment to sign the letter SIGN THE LETTER Support Reality Podcast: "Veterans need to tell their stories" – Dan Shea Vietnam War combat veteran Daniel Shea on his time in Vietnam and the impact that Agent Orange and post traumatic stress had on him and his family since... Listen now This Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — "Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam." This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured.. If you believe this history is important, please ... DONATE NOW to support these podcasts |
COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT! 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559 www.....................couragetoresist..org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Mobilization4Mumia
215-724-1618 Mobilizatio4Mumia.com mobilization4mumia@gmail.com PRESS RELEASE Contact Sophia Williams 917-806-0521, Ted Kelly 610-715-6924 or Joe Piette 610-931-2615
215-724-1618 Mobilizatio4Mumia.com mobilization4mumia@gmail.com PRESS RELEASE Contact Sophia Williams 917-806-0521, Ted Kelly 610-715-6924 or Joe Piette 610-931-2615
Philadelphia, Jan. 30 - Mumia Abu-Jamal has always insisted on his innocence in the death of police officer Daniel Faulkner, blaming police, judicial and prosecutorial misconduct for his politically-tainted conviction. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is expected to announce his response this week to the legal briefs for Post Conviction Relief Act hearings and the request to remand Abu-Jamal's case back to Common Pleas court, filed by his attorneys in early September 2019. Abu-Jamal's supporters will rally outside DA Krasner's office at 4:30 on Friday, January 31, whether or not he challenges Mumia's appeals. We call for Mumia's release...
Recent exonerations of 10 Philadelphia residents unfairly convicted for crimes they did not commit reveal a simple truth - the Philadelphia police, courts and prosecutors convicted innocent Black men based on gross violations of their constitutional rights. The same patterns of constitutional violations plague the case of Abu-Jamal. Since Jan. 2018, Sherman McCoy, James Frazier, Dwayne Thorpe, Terrance Lewis, Jamaal Simmons, Dontia Patterson, John Miller, Willie Veasey, Johnny Berry and Chester Holmann III have all been exonerated by DA Larry Krasner's Conviction Integrity Unit. Philadelphia is not alone. The National Registry of Exonerations counted 165 exonerations last year. The registry has tallied 2,500 wrongful convictions since 1989, costing defendants more than 22,000 years of incarceration. Seven of the ten men released in Philadelphia were convicted by longtime district attorney Lynne Abraham, a "tough-on-crime" prosecutor who regularly sought maximum punishments and death spentences. Abraham as Common Pleas Court Judge arraigned Abu-Jamal in 1981and years later as District Attorney fought his post conviction relief hearings... Ineffective counsel, false witness testimony, witness coercion and intimidation, phony ballistics evidence, prosecution failure to turn over evidence to the defense as required by law, racist jury selections -- these and other legal errors led to the exoneration of these innocent defendants after decades in prison.. These are the same police, judicial and prosecutorial misconduct practices Abu-Jamal's attorneys and supporters have been citing since 1982. In the late 1970s and early 80s, Abu-Jamal was a daily radio reporter for WHYY and NPR who earned acclaim for his award-winning reporting. As a journalist who reported fairly on the MOVE organization's resistance against state repression, he drew the ire of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police and the notoriously racist Police Commissioner and later Mayor Frank Rizzo. On Dec. 9, 1981, while driving a cab to supplement his income, Abu-Jamal happened upon his brother in an altercation with Faulkner. Faulkner was killed. Abu-Jamal, who was shot and severely beaten by police, was charged in Faulkner's death, even though witnesses reported seeing another man, most probably the passenger in Abu-Jamal's brother's car, running from the scene. Imprisoned for nearly four decades, Abu-Jamal has maintained his innocence. He successfully won his release from Pennsylvania's death row in 2011.. In December 2018 he won the right to appeal his 1982 conviction because of biased judicial oversight by PA Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille In early January 2019, DA Krasner reported finding six boxes of previously undisclosed evidence held by prosecutors in the case and allowed Abu-Jamal's attorneys to review the files. In September 2019 Abu-Jamal's lawyers filed new appellate briefs, including a request that the case be returned for a hearing before the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court based on finding of concrete evidence of prosecutorial misconduct by the DA's office in his 1982 trial. A Sept.. 9, 2019 Abu-Jamal's attorneys Judith Ritter and Sam Spital filed a brief in PA Superior Court to support his claim that his 1982 trial was fundamentally unfair and violated the Constitution. They argue the prosecution failed to disclose evidence as required and discriminated against African Americans when selecting the jury. And, his 1982 lawyer did not adequately challenge the State's witnesses. The attorneys also filed a motion revealing new evidence of constitutional violations such as promises by the prosecutor to pay or give leniency to two witnesses. There is also new evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection. Attorney Ritter contends that the new evidence shows Abu-Jamal's trial was "fundamentally unfair and tainted by serious constitutional violations." https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZgI0jvcWY5soAh_DXKdNnJJZSY0HEftuRwthQMurgd8/edit?usp=sharing
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Mumia Abu-Jamal: New Chance for Freedom
Police and State Frame-Up Must Be Fully Exposed!
Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent. Courts have ignored and suppressed evidence of his innocence for decades.... But now, one court has thrown out all the decisions of the PA Supreme Court that denied Mumia's appeals against his unjust conviction during the years of 1998 to 2012!
This ruling, by Judge Leon Tucker, was made because one judge on the PA Supreme Court during those years, Ronald Castille, was lacking the "appearance of impartiality." In plain English, he was clearly biased against Mumia. Before sitting on the PA Supreme Court, Castille had been District Attorney (or assistant DA) during the time of Mumia's frame-up and conviction, and had used his office to express a special interest in pursuing the death penalty for "cop-killers." Mumia was in the cross-hairs. Soon he was wrongly convicted and sent to death row for killing a police officer.....
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning and intrepid journalist, a former Black Panther, MOVE supporter, and a critic of police brutality and murder. Mumia was framed by police, prosecutors, and leading elements of both Democratic and Republican parties, for the shooting of a police officer.. The US Justice Department targeted him as well... A racist judge helped convict him, and corrupt courts have kept him locked up despite much evidence that should have freed him. He continues his commentary and journalism from behind bars. As of 2019, he has been imprisoned for 37 years for a crime he did not commit.
Time is up! FREE MUMIA NOW!
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DA's Hidden Files Show Frame-Up of Mumia
In the midst of Mumia's fight for his right to challenge the state Supreme Court's negative rulings, a new twist was revealed: six boxes of files on Mumia's case--with many more still hidden--were surreptitiously concealed for decades in a back room at the District Attorney's office in Philadelphia. The very fact that these files on Mumia's case were hidden away for decades is damning in the extreme, and their revelations confirm what we have known for decades: Mumia was framed for a crime he did not commit!
So far, the newly revealed evidence confirms that, at the time of Mumia's 1982 trial, chief prosecutor Joe McGill illegally removed black jurors from the jury, violating the Batson decision. Also revealed: The prosecution bribed witnesses into testifying that they saw Mumia shoot the slain police officer when they hadn't seen any such thing.... Taxi driver Robert Chobert, who was on probation for fire-bombing a school yard at the time, had sent a letter demanding his money for lying on the stand....... Very important, but the newly revealed evidence is just the tip of the iceberg!
All Evidence of Mumia's Innocence Must Be Brought Forward Now!
Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was rigged against him from beginning to end........ All of the evidence of Mumia's innocence--which was earlier suppressed or rejected--must now be heard:
• Mumia was framed - The judge at Mumia's trial, Albert Sabo, was overheard to say, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n____r." And he proceeded to do just that.... Mumia was thrown out of his own trial for defending himself! Prosecution "witnesses" were coerced or bribed at trial to lie against Mumia.. In addition to Chobert, this included key witness Cynthia White, a prostitute who testified that she saw Mumia shoot Faulkner... White's statements had to be rewritten under intense pressure from the cops, because she was around the corner and out of sight of the shooting at the time! Police bribed her with promises of being allowed to work her corner, and not sent to state prison for her many prostitution charges.
• Mumia only arrived on the scene after Officer Faulkner was shot - William Singletary, a tow-truck business owner who had no reason to lie against the police, said he had been on the scene the whole time, that Mumia was not the shooter, and that Mumia had arrived only after the shooting of Faulkner. Singletary's statements were torn up, his business was wrecked, and he was threatened by police to be out of town for the trial (which, unfortunately, he was)...
• There is no evidence that Mumia fired a gun - Mumia was shot on the scene by an arriving police officer and arrested. But the cops did not test his hands for gun-powder residue--a standard procedure in shootings! They also did not test Faulkner's hands. The prosecution nevertheless claimed Mumia was the shooter, and that he was shot by Faulkner as the officer fell to the ground. Ballistics evidence was corrupted to falsely show that Mumia's gun was the murder weapon, when his gun was reportedly still in his taxi cab, which was in police custody days after the shooting!
• The real shooter fled the scene and was never charged - Veronica Jones was a witness who said that after hearing the shots from a block away, she had seen two people fleeing the scene of the shooting.... This could not have included Mumia, who had been shot and almost killed at the scene. Jones was threatened by the police with arrest and loss of custody of her children. She then lied on the stand at trial to say she had seen no one running away.
• Abu-Jamal never made a confession - Mumia has always maintained his innocence. But police twice concocted confessions that Mumia never made. Inspector Alfonso Giordano, the senior officer at the crime scene, made up a confession for Mumia. But Giordano was not allowed to testify at trial, because he was top on the FBI's list of corrupt cops in the Philadelphia police force... At the DA's request, another cop handily provided a second "confession," allegedly heard by a security guard in the hospital......... But at neither time was Mumia--almost fatally shot--able to speak.. And an earlier police report by cops in the hospital said that, referring to Mumia: "the negro male made no comment"!
• The crime scene was tampered with by police - Police officers at the scene rearranged some evidence, and handled what was alleged to be Mumia's gun with their bare hands... A journalist's photos revealed this misconduct. The cops then left the scene unattended for hours.. All of this indicates a frame-up in progress....
• The real shooter confessed, and revealed the reason for the crime - Arnold Beverly came forward in the 1990s. He said in a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, that he, not Mumia, had been the actual shooter. He said that he, along with "another guy," had been hired to do the hit, because Faulkner was "a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area"! (affidavit of Arnold Beverly).
• The corruption of Philadelphia police is documented and well known - This includes that of Giordano, who was the first cop to manufacture a "confession" by Mumia... Meanwhile, Faulkner's cooperation with the federal anti-corruption investigations of Philadelphia police is strongly suggested by his lengthy and heavily redacted FBI file......
• Do cops kill other cops? There are other cases in Philadelphia that look that way. Frank Serpico, an NYC cop who investigated and reported on police corruption, was abandoned by fellow cops after being shot in a drug bust. Mumia was clearly made a scape-goat for the crimes of corrupt Philadelphia cops who were protecting their ill-gotten gains.
• Politicians and US DOJ helped the frame-up - Ed Rendell, former DA, PA governor, and head of the Democratic National Committee--and now a senior advisor to crime-bill author Joe Biden--is complicit in the frame-up of Mumia. The US Justice Department targeted Mumia for his anti-racist activities when he was a teenager, and later secretly warned then-prosecutor Rendell not to use Giordano as a witness against Mumia because he was an FBI target for corruption..
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All this should lead to an immediate freeing of Mumia! But we are still a ways away from that, and we have no confidence in the capitalist courts to finish the job. We must act! This victory in local court allowing new appeals must now lead to a full-court press on all the rejected and suppressed evidence of Mumia's innocence!
Mass Movement Needed To Free Mumia!
Mumia's persecution by local, state and federal authorities of both political parties has been on-going, and has generated a world-wide movement in his defense... This movement has seen that Mumia, as a radio journalist who exposed the brutal attacks on the black community by the police in Philadelphia, has spoken out as a defender of working people of all colors and all nationalities in his ongoing commentaries (now on KPFA/Pacifica radio), despite being on death row, and now while serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP)...
In 1999, Oakland Teachers for Mumia held unauthorized teach-ins in Oakland schools on Mumia and the death penalty, despite the rabid hysteria in the bourgeois media. Teachers in Rio de Janeiro held similar actions. Letters of support came in from maritime workers and trade unions around the world.. Later in 1999, longshore workers shut down all the ports on the West Coast to free Mumia, and led a mass march of 25,000 Mumia supporters in San Francisco................
A year later, a federal court lifted Mumia's death sentence, based on improper instructions to the jury by trial judge Albert Sabo.. The federal court ordered the local court to hold a new sentencing hearing... Fearing their frame-up of Mumia could be revealed in any new hearing, even if only on sentencing, state officials passed. Much to the chagrin of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)--which still seeks Mumia's death--this left Mumia with LWOP, death by life in prison..
Mumia supporters waged a struggle to get him the cure for the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, which he had likely contracted through a blood transfusion in hospital after he was shot by a cop at the 1981 crime scene. The Labor Action Committee conducted demonstrations against Gilead Sciences, the Foster City CA corporation that owns the cure, and charged $1,000 per pill! The Metalworkers Union of South Africa wrote a letter excoriating Governor Wolf for allowing untreated sick freedom fighters to die in prison as the apartheid government had done. Finally, Mumia did get the cure.. Now, more than ever, struggle is needed to free Mumia!
Now is the Time: Mobilize Again for Mumia's Freedom!
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.laboractionmumia...........org
Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal | Mumia Abu-Jamal is an I.....
November 2019
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Board Game
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/race-for-solidarity
Solidarity against racism has existed from the 1600's and continues until today
An exciting board game of chance, empathy and wisdom, that entertains and educates as it builds solidarity through learning about the destructive history of American racism and those who always fought back. Appreciate the anti-racist solidarity of working people, who built and are still building, the great progressive movements of history.. There are over 200 questions, with answers and references.
Spread the word!!
By Dr.... Nayvin Gordon
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50 years in prison: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!! FREE Chip Fitzgerald Grandfather, Father, Elder, Friend former Black Panther
Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald has been in prison since he was locked up 50 years ago...... A former member of the Black Panther Party, Chip is now 70 years old, and suffering the consequences of a serious stroke. He depends on a wheelchair for his mobility. He has appeared before the parole board 17 times, but they refuse to release him.. NOW is the time for Chip to come home! In September 1969, Chip and two other Panthers were stopped by a highway patrolman..... During the traffic stop, a shooting broke out, leaving Chip and a police officer both wounded. Chip was arrested a month later and charged with attempted murder of the police and an unrelated murder of a security guard. Though the evidence against him was weak and Chip denied any involvement, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1972, the California Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty.......... Chip and others on Death Row had their sentences commuted to Life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. All of them became eligible for parole after serving 7 more years...... But Chip was rejected for parole, as he has been ever since. Parole for Lifers basically stopped under Governors Deukmajian, Wilson, and Davis (1983-2003), resulting in increasing numbers of people in prison and 23 new prisons. People in prison filed lawsuits in federal courts: people were dying as a result of the overcrowding.. To rapidly reduce the number of people in prison, the court mandated new parole hearings: · for anyone 60 years or older who had served 25 years or more; · for anyone convicted before they were 23 years old; · for anyone with disabilities Chip qualified for a new parole hearing by meeting all three criteria. But the California Board of Parole Hearings has used other methods to keep Chip locked up. Although the courts ordered that prison rule infractions should not be used in parole considerations, Chip has been denied parole because he had a cellphone.......... Throughout his 50 years in prison, Chip has been denied his right to due process – a new parole hearing as ordered by Federal courts. He is now 70, and addressing the challenges of a stroke victim. His recent rules violation of cellphone possession were non-violent and posed no threat to anyone. He has never been found likely to commit any crimes if released to the community – a community of his children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues who are ready to support him and welcome him home. The California Board of Parole Hearings is holding Chip hostage..... We call on Governor Newsom to release Chip immediately. What YOU can do to support this campaign to FREE CHIP: 1) Sign and circulate the petition to FREE Chip. Download it at https://www.change.org/p/california-free-chip-fitzgerald Print out the petition and get signatures at your workplace, community meeting, or next social gathering. 2) Write an email to Governor Newsom's office (sample message at:https://docs..google.com/document/d/1iwbP_eQEg2J1T2h-tLKE-Dn2ZfpuLx9MuNv2z605DMc/edit?usp=sharing 3) Write to Chip: Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald #B27527, CSP-LAC P.O. Box 4490 B-4-150 Lancaster, CA 93539 -- Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863...................9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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On Abortion: From Facebook
Best explanation I've heard so far......., Copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied..................., "Last night, I was in a debate about these new abortion laws being passed in red states. My son stepped in with this comment which was a show stopper. One of the best explanations I have read:, , 'Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question.... However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not..., , Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v.. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973).. Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you.. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent..... It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional.... This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or how many lives they would save...., , That's the law.., , Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily.............. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong............ That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees....... But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy..., , She may choose to carry the baby to term..... She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between... But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side... Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means....", , Feel free to copy/paste and re-post., y Sent from my iPhone
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Celebrating the release of Janet and Janine Africa 
Take action now to support Jalil A. Muntaqim's release
Jalil A...... Muntaqim was a member of the Black Panther Party and has been a political prisoner for 48 years since he was arrested at the age of 19 in 1971. He has been denied parole 11 times since he was first eligible in 2002, and is now scheduled for his 12th parole hearing... Additionally, Jalil has filed to have his sentence commuted to time served by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Visit Jalil's support page, check out his writing and poetry, and Join Critical Resistance in supporting a vibrant intergenerational movement of freedom fighters in demanding his release. 48 years is enough. Write, email, call, and tweet at Governor Cuomo in support of Jalil's commutation and sign this petition demanding his release. http://freedomarchives.org/Support...Jalil/Campaign.html
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
https://www.gofundme.....com/funds-for-kevin-cooper?member=1994108 For 34 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.. Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here ..... In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov..... Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.. The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings ......... Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, paper, toiletries, supplementary food, and/or phone calls........ Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
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Don't extradite Assange!
To the government of the UK Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world's most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state.......... Both Obama, Clinton and Trump have declared that arresting Julian Assange should be a priority... We have recently received confirmation [1] that he has been charged in secret so as to have him extradited to the USA as soon as he can be arrested. Assange's persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [2] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public - and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world - is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning... The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West..... Sign now! The courageous nation of Ecuador has offered Assange political asylum within its London embassy for several years until now. However, under pressure by the USA, the new government has made it clear that they want to drive Assange out of the embassy and into the arms of the waiting police as soon as possible... They have already curtailed his internet and his visitors and turned the heating off, leaving him freezing in a desolate state for the past few months and leading to the rapid decline of his health, breaching UK obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Therefore, our demand both to the government of Ecuador and the government of the UK is: don't extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights, make his stay at the embassy as bearable as possible and enable him to leave the embassy towards a secure country as soon as there are guarantees not to arrest and extradite him........... Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger... The world is still watching. Sign now! [1] https://www..nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks.....html [2] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-concluded-prosecution-of-julian-assange-for-publishing-documents-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedom/ Sign this petition: https://internal.diem25.....org/en/petitions/1
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Words of Wisdom 
Louis Robinson Jr., 77 Recording secretary for Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers from 1999 to 2018, with the minutes from a meeting of his union's retirees' chapter.
"One mistake the international unions in the United States made was when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. When he did that, the unions could have brought this country to a standstill...... All they had to do was shut down the truck drivers for a month, because then people would not have been able to get the goods they needed. So that was one of the mistakes they made. They didn't come together as organized labor and say: "No.... We aren't going for this......... Shut the country down." That's what made them weak. They let Reagan get away with what he did. A little while after that, I read an article that said labor is losing its clout, and I noticed over the years that it did.. It happened... It doesn't feel good..." [On the occasion of the shut-down of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant March 6, 2019.........] https://www.......nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant...html
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1) E.U. Proposes a Climate Law. Greta Thunberg Hears ‘Empty Words.’
The bill would set a target of net zero carbon emissions across the bloc by 2050. That is decades later than what many activists say is needed.
By Monika Pronczuk, March 4, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/world/europe/eu-climate-law-greta-thunberg.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage
Petr David Josek/Associated Press
BRUSSELS — The European Union laid out plans on Wednesday for a climate law that would set a target of net zero carbon emissions across the bloc by 2050.
But the bill, part of a wider policy package called the Green Deal, was immediately criticized by climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, who denounced it as “empty words.” Many activists had called on the bloc to set a 2030 target, and to specify now how it would be achieved.
European officials had hoped to win the support of Ms. Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish activist, when they met with her in Brussels on Wednesday. But she went on instead to tell the European Parliament that the proposal amounted to “giving up on the Paris Agreement,” the pact signed in 2016 under which almost 200 nations promised to limit their emissions, and from which the United States has withdrawn.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission — the bloc’s executive arm, which formulated the bill — described it as “a compass for the next 30 years.” If passed by the European Parliament and its 27 member states over the next several months, it would require the commission to factor climate goals into every piece of legislation.
European nations are divided, with countries like Poland, which are more dependent on coal, seeking a longer time frame and a general target for the bloc as a whole.
Twelve other member states, including France, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, released a letter on Tuesday asking that a 2030 climate target be set “as soon as possible,” ahead of a summit meeting with China scheduled for September and the United Nations climate meeting, known as COP26, in November.
Instead, the European Commission proposed a September 2020 deadline to assess the impact of a potential reduction of emissions by 55 percent, and only then to devise a plan on how to get there. As a gesture to countries like Poland, which said it could not meet a specific national goal, the bill instead set out a neutrality target for the European Union as a whole.
The bloc produced just over 9 percent of the world’s carbon emissions in 2018.
Under the bill, the commission would assess progress toward climate neutrality every five years after 2030 and identify emissions targets for each country.
In an open letter published on Tuesday and co-signed by Ms. Thunberg, young climate activists wrote that setting a 2050 neutrality goal “equals surrender” and called for reduction goals for “every following month and year to come.”
Greenpeace’s adviser on E.U. climate policy, Sebastian Mang, said the time to act was now. “With no plans for a science-based 2030 target, nor measures to end fossil fuel subsidies, we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” he said.
But some climate experts praised the plan.
Quentin Genard of E3G, a Brussels-based climate research institute, called the commission’s proposal “bold” because it made climate neutrality a main principle.
“I understand where the young activists are coming from,” Mr. Genard said, “but I am looking for a politically feasible way to do it. It took us 14 months to agree on climate neutrality by 2050.”
Simone Tagliapietra, a research fellow from Bruegel, a Brussels-based economics research institution, said that the proposal represented a “landmark,” but that the responsibility ultimately fell on national governments.
“Of course, the commission can put in place targets and proposed pathways, but it can only move within the boundaries set out by the treaties” that define its role, Mr. Tagliapietra said. “Only the national governments can give the commission more power.’’
Frans Timmermans, the commissioner responsible for the Green Deal, praised Ms. Thunberg despite her criticism. Without her and the people she inspired, the European Union would probably not be discussing a climate bill, he said.
“I tried to explain to her that we have different approaches,” Mr. Timmermans said. “Ours is based on us reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, and we are more optimistic about emerging technologies that can help us speed up the process.’’
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2) ‘Flood the Streets’: ICE Targets Sanctuary Cities With Increased Surveillance
ICE is boosting its operations in sanctuary cities to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, conducting round-the-clock surveillance in addition to deploying elite tactical agents.
By Caitlin Dickerson, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Annie Correal, March 5, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/us/ICE-BORTAC-sanctuary-cities.html
John Moore/Getty Images
Intensifying its enforcement in so-called sanctuary cities across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun 24-hour-a-day surveillance operations around the homes and workplaces of undocumented immigrants. The agency plans to deploy hundreds of additional officers in unmarked cars in the coming weeks to increase arrests in cities where local law enforcement agencies do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
ICE leadership has requested at least 500 special agents who normally conduct long-term investigations into dangerous criminals and traffickers to join the enhanced arrest campaignrolling out in sanctuary cities, according to an internal email reviewed by The New York Times.
The request follows an earlier decision, made public last month, to deploy elite tactical BORTAC agents — immigration SWAT teams that are normally assigned to risky border smuggling, rescue and intelligence operations — to help arrest and deport immigrants in sanctuary cities.
The expanded surveillance operations and added manpower are the latest intensification in a conflict between the Trump administration and cities that refuse to help with deportations, including Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans and Newark. The effort began last month and will run through Dec. 31, according to the internal email, which says the initiative is called Operation Palladium.
The latest directive is simple: Arrest as many undocumented immigrants as possible, and “flood the streets,” as one official involved said his bosses had put it.
The Trump administration’s renewed focus on sweeping up undocumented immigrants in sanctuary jurisdictions comes after years of efforts to persuade those local governments to turn over anyone released from prison or jail who is in the United States illegally.
Local leaders in those communities often argue that doing so could make their cities less safe by discouraging people from cooperating with the police.
The Trump administration has fought back, moving to withhold certain federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions and filing lawsuits about sanctuary policies against state and local governments in California, New Jersey and Washington State.
Because immigration law violations are civil infractions rather than criminal ones, the officers deployed in the expanded ICE operations cannot, in most cases, obtain warrants to forcibly enter places where their subjects are hiding.
Instead, ICE officers are embarking on the aggressive surveillance campaign, which involves closely watching some individuals for more than 12 hours a day in the hopes of arresting them outside their homes or workplaces.
To achieve their goal, officers assigned to the latest operations are working longer hours, and for longer stretches of time, often 10 days in a row rather than the usual five.
While surveillance has always played a role in immigration enforcement, it is becoming an increasingly important tool, agency officials said, as previous methods — such as knocking on doors of people wanted for deportation — become less effective. Campaigns by immigrant advocates have encouraged undocumented immigrants to keep the door closed if an officer does not have a warrant.
Advocacy groups in New York say they have documented an increasing use of aggressive tactics, including agents brandishing weapons and claiming to be police officers. In one case last month, a 26-year-old Mexican tourist was shot in the face while ICE agents were arresting someone else in Brooklyn.
In the Bronx, a local resident on Tuesday took a photo through a peephole of an ICE officer in military-style fatigues carrying an assault rifle on the other side of an apartment door. The resident shared it with Jorge Muñiz, an organizer who is part of a local ICE watch group, and it was then shared widely on the internet, raising alarm.
ICE officials said they could not comment on that operation, but said that it included officers from an special response team whose members may be heavily armed for high-risk enforcement actions, and that the officers had a criminal arrest warrant issued by a federal judge.
An ICE official directly familiar with Operation Palladium said the enforcement actions were to take place in spurts in different cities to avoid intense coverage by the national media that could cause people wanted for deportation to hole up in their homes for days or weeks.
“It should be really no surprise, it’s exactly what we said we would do,” said Henry Lucero, the top government official overseeing the division of ICE that conducts street arrests. He added: “If there’s no cooperation, that’s not going to stop ICE from doing its job. We are still going to try to protect the public as much as we can by arresting and removing criminal aliens from the communities before they can get another crime or make another victim.”
Mr. Lucero would not provide specifics about the operation, including data on how many people had been arrested, citing an agency policy against discussing active law enforcement operations. An official familiar with the matter said agents in Chicago had been making about 10 arrests per day, more than usual for that jurisdiction.
“I question the level of effectiveness other than scaring people,” said Lori Lightfoot, the city’s mayor, who has been a frequent critic of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda and has instituted sanctuary policies that ban city officials from cooperating with ICE.
Ms. Lightfoot said the city would readily turn over wanted individuals to ICE if the agency could provide a warrant or court order signed by a judge. “If you’ve got the facts, and you’ve got the probable cause, get the judge to sign the order,” she said, adding: “If that happens, then there’s no choice. But we’re not going to do it simply on the basis of an ICE agent’s signature, in a world in which ICE has become highly politicized.”
An official familiar with the latest ICE operation said its agents were targeting individuals who, because of sanctuary policies, were let go by local police officers even though the agency had asked for them to be temporarily held in custody.
The official said that while some of those targets have been apprehended in the effort, the majority of the arrests have been “collateral” — undocumented individuals who were not targeted, but who happened to be present during an attempted apprehension.
Mr. Lucero said that no one living in the United States illegally was safe from deportation, but that officers could exercise discretion in choosing whether to make such collateral arrests.
In New York, the Immigrant Defense Project, an immigrant advocacy group that monitors ICE activity, said it had received about 80 reports of ICE enforcement actions in the first two months of 2020. Although they received a similar number during the same period of 2019, most of those incidents took place in courthouses; the majority of reports received this year concerned arrest attempts at homes or workplaces.
The organization said it had also received reports of ICE agents using ruses to gain entry to people’s homes or to obtain information about their relatives. But the reports of heavily armed officers banging on doors at a Bronx apartment building this week were unusual.
“We have never had a report of an incident where the officer had an assault rifle,” at least not openly in the streets, said the deputy director of the Immigrant Defense Project, Mizue Aizeki.
The news that the Department of Homeland Security had temporarily reassigned the tactical agents, including teams that investigate smugglers and conduct risky search-and-rescue missions, to help make street arrests of undocumented immigrants prompted an outcry from federal lawmakers. Sixty of them wrote in a letter to the heads of both agencies that the move was an “unnecessary use of force.”
Mark Morgan, the acting head of Customs and Border Protection, played down the decision to deploy border agents with tactical training to help with street arrests, saying that “just a handful” would be sent to sanctuary cities, and that they would play only a supporting role, using the same methods as typical ICE agents.
Tim Sullivan, the chief patrol agent of the special operations groups, said 100 agents, half from elite units such as BORTAC, were deployed to help boost the sanctuary city operations. He said they were sent, in part, because they are not bound by the Border Patrol’s union agreement, which limits the use of overtime and last-minute assignments.
Mr. Sullivan added that his agents would not wear full tactical gear for the temporary mission. Instead, he said, they will wear civilian clothes, with the option of adding body armor. They will remain on assignment in the cities at least until May, according to Salvador Zamora, a Border Patrol spokesman, at which point they may either be sent back to their usual work, or remain in place and be joined by re-enforcements from BORTAC.
Rather than conducting SWAT-type operations and rescue missions, officials said, the agents are conducting patrol work, spending long hours in cars watching people filter in and out of homes, and standing by in case some try to fight back during arrests.
According to the internal email reviewed by The Times, between 500 and 600 investigators are also being temporarily assigned to the sanctuary cities operations from the separate division of ICE known as Homeland Security Investigations, which focuses on breaking up human and drug smuggling rings.
Agents from that division have often been called on to help ICE with street arrests, but they have sometimes publicly complained, arguing that they are being diverted from more important duties.
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3) How Working-Class Life Is Killing Americans, in Charts
By David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson, March 6, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/working-class-death-rate.html
The charts to this article can't be reproduced here so go to the url to view them all.
When the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton first published their research on “deaths of despair” five years ago, they focused on middle-aged whites. So many white working-class Americans in their 40s and 50s were dying of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse that the overall mortality rate for the age group was no longer falling – a rare and shocking pattern in a modern society.
But as Case and Deaton continued digging into the data, it became clear that the grim trends didn’t apply only to middle-aged whites. Up and down the age spectrum, deaths of despair have been surging for people without a four-year college degree:
Case and Deaton — a married couple who are both economists at Princeton — try to explain the causes in a new book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.” Their basic answer is that working-class life in the United States is more difficult than it is in any other high-income country. “European countries have faced the same kind of technological change we have, and they’re not seeing the people killing themselves with guns or drugs or alcohol,” Case says. “There is something unique about the way the U.S. is handling this.”
Inequality has risen more in the United States — and middle-class incomes have stagnated more severely — than in France, Germany, Japan or elsewhere. Large corporations have increasedtheir market share, and labor unions have shriveled, leaving workers with little bargaining power. Outsourcing has become the norm, which means that executives often see low-wage workers not as colleagues but as expenses.
And the United States suffers from by far the world’s most expensive health-care system. It acts as a tax on workers and drains resources that could otherwise be spent on schools, day care, roads, public transit and more. Despite its unparalleled spending, the American medical system also fails to keep many people healthy.
The two economists initially focused on non-Hispanic whites because the mortality trends were worst for them. Deaths rates from suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse among whites surpassed the rates for blacks shortly after 2000, for example. But the black working class is hardly thriving -- and deaths of despair have surged among them in the last few years. Overall life expectancy remains significantly higher for whites than blacks. So, of course, do incomes and wealth.
Many of the problems afflicting the working class span racial groups, and Case and Deaton emphasize that these problems aren’t merely financial. Life for many middle- and low-income Americans can lack structure, status and meaning. People don’t always knowwhat days or hours they will be working the following week. They often don’t officially work for the company where they spend their days, which robs them of the pride that comes from being part of a shared enterprise.
“Many people used to associate the meaning of their life with what their corporation or institution was doing,” says Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics. Miners and factory workers identified themselves as such. Warehouse workers, especially those whose paycheck is signed by a staffing company, rarely feel the same connection.
The result of these trends has been a “coming apart,” as Case and Deaton put it, of day-to-day life for whites without a college degree versus those with a college degree:
Given all of these alarming social indicators, it’s not surprising that some other causes of death — in addition to suicide, alcoholism and drug overdose — have also started rising for Americans without a college degree. Heart disease is the most significant, exacerbated by obesity, drinking and drug use.
The combined result is a divergence in the life expectancy of white college graduates and non-graduates. Overall mortality for whites between the ages of 45 and 54 has held roughly steady in the last 25 years. But that average hides a big increase in death rates for non-graduates and a big decline for graduates.
What can be done about all of this? Many of the solutions are obvious, if difficult to accomplish. The medical system should be overhauled to put a higher priority on health than on wealth for people who work in the industry, Case and Deaton argue. (And that doesn’t necessarily mean a mandatory version of Medicare, they add.)
The federal government should do a better job of keeping big business from maximizing profits at the expense of their workers, by enforcing antitrust laws and encouraging new kinds of labor unions. Governments at all levels should help more people earn college degrees, both four-year degrees (like B.A.’s) and meaningful vocational degrees.
Other economic research has found that a college degree isn’t simply a marker. Students who attend and graduate from college do better in life than otherwise similar students who didn’t get the same opportunities. Graduates are more likely to be employed, earn more, marry and stay married, be satisfied with their lives, be healthy and live longer. These findings suggest that college itself — both the classroom learning and the experience of successfully navigating college — brings long-terms benefits.
The focus of Case and Deaton’s book isn’t education, but it lingers as the backdrop to all of their findings. “This B.A./non-B.A. divide,” Deaton says, “just comes up again and again and again.”
My New York Times Comment: "Whether you go to college or not is a symptom of the real problem of vast income inequality and the fact that income for the masses—especially but not limited to the U.S.—is falling at an alarming rate. To put it another way, real income hasn't changed since the 1970s while the cost of living has skyrocketed. Rents, as only one example, have gone from 1/4 of you income to, in some cases, 3/4 of your income. Meanwhile 26 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent. The problem is the profit motive of capitalism that puts the accumulation and protection of private wealth above all else. That's what the military, police and prisons are for. To protect the wealth of the rich and blame the poor for all their problems like not going to college." —Bonnie Weinsteinhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/working-class-death-rate.html#commentsContainer&permid=105653388:105653388
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4) When Coronavirus Quarantine Is Class Warfare
A pandemic is a great way to examine American class inequities.
By Charlie Warzel, March 5, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/coronavirus-quarantine-hermit-tech.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Miles Fortune for The New York Times
It’s been a big week for what I refer to as “Hermit Tech.” Stock in technology companies that facilitate working from home have soared in a spiraling market otherwise anxious by an impending coronavirus pandemic. Netflix is preparing for the server strain of the bored but quarantined masses. Expensive Peloton stationary bikes and streaming workout services are seeing substantial spikes in interest. Tech guides are popping up suggesting everything from noise-canceling headphones, Wi-Fi signal boosters, and productivity hacks for families who’ll need to make close quarters work and life livable.
As a Hermit Tech aficionado, this makes sense. I’m a Times employee living in Montana and so social distancing is closer to the status quo for me than I care to admit. I work from home. I show my disheveled face in meetings via Zoom and Skype and Google Hangouts. I FaceTime my therapist who practices in New York City, where I used to live. I chat endlessly with co-workers, sources and friends via Slack and 49,000 other direct messaging channels. Recently, my partner and I calculated that we’d save on gym membership if we splurged upfront on a $2,245 Peloton. Hermit Tech has made my (definitely not typical) life wildly efficient. Thanks to technology, human contact has unexpectedly become a luxury I can choose to seek out.
And my lifestyle is a luxury. I’m incredibly fortunate to have an employer that allows remote work and to have access to the sometimes expensive tools that help me get my job (and even mental health treatment) done. The same goes for the disposable income that allows for the bike and Amazon Prime. I don’t use Instacart or DoorDash for delivery (mostly on principle after pieces like this from my Times colleagues) or need a service like Wag for an on-demand dog walker, but those services are accessible to me, should I want them. Partly because Silicon Valley has been building them for someone just like me for the last decade.
In The Atlantic recently, Ian Bogost argued that “contemporary society has been bracing, and even longing, for quarantine” and that “being holed up at home has never been more pleasant.” He’s right.
But that pleasantness is heavily underwritten by a “vast digital underclass.” Many services that allow you to stay at home work only when others have to be out in the world on your behalf. Worried the grocery store is a petri dish? A contract Instacart grocery shopper will go in your place. That overpriced Purell you panic purchased today from Amazon will show up at your door tomorrow thanks to a small army of humans who showed up at work because they can’t afford not to. Same goes for the instructor leading the on-demand high intensity interval training spin class that saved you from dealing with that guy who won’t stop coughing by the free weights at the gym. They may not be a gig worker, but they can’t lead your class from their homes.
This is by no means exclusive to tech. Turns out, a pandemic is a great way to examine American class inequities — from restaurant workers to health care. But there’s something especially clarifying as it pertains to the gig economy. Silicon Valley has long faced criticism for building products for itself, which is to say, products aimed at solving problems of upper middle class men who spend far too much time working and crave microefficiencies and greater convenience. Much has been reported on how that convenience has created a precarious under-economy of contract workers, dangerous working conditions and same-day delivery environmental concerns.
It’s unsurprising then that Silicon Valley seems well poised to deal with the creeping pandemic. Microsoft, Amazon, and Twitter were among the first major companies to encourage workers to stay home (to be clear, this is a responsible way to approach a viral epidemic). Many have led the way on backing out of work travel to conferences. Recently, BuzzFeed News reported that tech companies are looking at the outbreak as a test case for the “long-gestating but never-arriving moment when working remotely will broadly replace working in person.”
Should Covid-19 usher in a newfound work-from-home movement, it could intensify these inequities. Working from home is a privilege afforded almost exclusively to knowledge workers. More flexible work could take the burden of some families with regard to child care and make part-time careers or balancing work and family life easier. But scaling back on physical workplaces could also mean fewer stable building facilities jobs. Those employees could then be forced into a gig economy with few labor protections that expands to fill the needs of an increasingly homebound work force.
Of course it doesn’t have to happen this way. As The Times’s editorial board wrote this week, “Congress can help by mandating that workers receive paid time off if they fall ill, or if they need to care for an ailing family member.” Companies — especially those in the gig economy — can do the same by offering paid sick leave, relying less on contractors and by allowing employees to unionize for protections so they aren’t forced ignore advice to stay home.
Those like myself fortunate enough to have workplace flexibility can do something as well by not transferring our burden to prepare for a pandemic onto others. We can be mindful of the people underwriting and powering our convenience. We can patronize establishments that support employees. We can develop a conscientious culture around working from home that doesn’t submit to our worst impulses. That means using all that time saved via commutes to improve our lives but also the lives of those around us. This can mean small things like cooking our own meals or walking our own dogs. Or bigger undertakings like volunteering, protesting and getting involved in our communities.
It’s contradictory but, during a pandemic, conscientious isolation is actually a social act — one that protects others by flattening the outbreak curve. If we’re mindful, the same logic can apply to world where more of us are remote. Social distancing doesn’t have to mean distancing ourselves from our shared humanity.
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5) F.D.A. Bans School Electric Shock Devices
The ban is national, but it is squarely targeted at a single school in Massachusetts that has been using electric shocks to condition students’ behavior for decades.
By Jacey Fortin, March 6, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/electric-shock-fda-ban.html
Charles Krupa/Associated Press
In a rare and sweeping decision, the Food and Drug Administration announced this week that it was banning the use of electric shock devices to correct self-harming or aggressive behavior.
The practice presents “an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury,” the agency said in a statement on Wednesday.
The ban is national, but it is targeted at a single school: the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Mass., which serves students — both children and adults — who have intellectual disabilities or behavioral, emotional or psychiatric problems.
It appears to be the only school in the United States that uses painful electric shocks to discipline students, and the practice has been in place there for decades.
Those students who have been approved by a court to receive the treatment wear a backpack with a battery inside. It has protruding wires that can deliver shocks to the skin when triggered by an employee at the school.
The practice was meant to condition the behavior of students by causing pain when they acted in ways that endangered themselves or others.
“Evidence indicates a number of significant psychological and physical risks are associated with the use of these devices, including worsening of underlying symptoms, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, pain, burns and tissue damage,” the F.D.A.’s statement said. “In addition, many people who are exposed to these devices have intellectual or developmental disabilities that make it difficult to communicate their pain.”
The decision was a culmination of more than a decade of legal battles between the school and its critics, who argued that the electric shock devices were administered excessively and caused lasting damage. In one episode in 2002 that was captured on video, Andre McCollins, then an 18-year-old student, did not take off his jacket as instructed and was shocked repeatedly. In the video, he can be heard screaming “Ow” over and over.
His family sued in one of the most high-profile cases ever involving the school. The case was settled under confidential terms in 2012, and the school continued to use shock-aversion devices.
Some of the students’ relatives have defended the practice — saying that it worked to change students’ behavior when nothing else could — and denounced the F.D.A.’s decision.
“I just feel like I got punched in the gut when they did this,” said Louisa Goldberg, 66, whose son Andrew Goldberg, 39, lives at the center. “I’m just so sad.”
She said that her son had brain damage and epilepsy, and that he showed severe aggression as a teenager. There were violent episodes, trips to the hospital, and psychotropic medications that left him sluggish. His mother said he was placed in physical restraints for hours at a time.
“His life was torture,” she said.
Mr. Goldberg went to live at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center at age 19 and began wearing an electric shock device. Ms. Goldberg said her son would receive two-second shocks as a sporadic part of a broader treatment plan. He has since been weaned off the device and can do things he could not do before, like go to the movies.
“This treatment works, and I will stand by it, and I will fight for it,” Ms. Goldberg said.
In a statement on Thursday, the school said that the F.D.A. had “made a decision based on politics, not facts, to deny this lifesaving, court-approved treatment.”
“J.R.C. has provided countless hours of testimony, volumes of information and made clinicians, other staff and family members of our clients, or clients themselves, available to the F.D.A. over the past several years,” it said. “In fact, after multiple requests for the federal agency to visit the only facility impacted by this rule, the F.D.A. stuck its head in the sand and refused to visit.”
The school administers the electric shocks with a device called a graduated electronic decelerator. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the school said it had 282 clients, 55 of whom — all adults — had been approved by a court to wear the graduated electronic decelerator after all other treatments failed.
The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center was founded in 1971, and opponents of electric shock devices have fought against it for decades through legislation, lawsuits, petitions and reports that described the shocks as torture.
In a 2013 report, the United Nations special rapporteur for torture said that the rights of students at the center had been violated under the U.N. convention against torture.
But legal and legislative efforts did not stop the practice in Massachusetts. And in a recent victory for the center, a probate court judge in Bristol County, Mass., decided in 2018 that defendants in a lawsuit against the center had failed to show that the “aversive treatment used at J.R.C. does not conform to the accepted standard of care for treating individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.”
The F.D.A. rarely bans devices, and this decision has been in the works since at least 2018. Some proponents of a ban questioned the delay.
“The F.D.A. finally banning these devices is bittersweet, as action should have been taken a long time ago,” said Karen A. Zahka, a lawyer who represented Mr. McCollins, whose shocks were captured on video.
“For decades, adults and children at the Judge Rotenberg Center have been subjected to this inhumane treatment,” she said. “You can see from the video of Andre McCollins that the United Nations was and is right — it’s torture.”
Public records show that in recent years, the center has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying in both New YorkState (where more than half the center’s students are from) and Massachusetts. It has also spent more than a quarter-million dollars over the past decade on lobbying federal entities, including the F.D.A., the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Michael Flammia, a lawyer representing the school, said it planned to appeal the ban. He said the F.D.A.’s decision to approve the use of the shock devices in 1994 had since been bolstered by research showing how effective they were for patients with severe behavioral problems.
“The F.D.A. isn’t entitled under the law to abandon the science and abandon the scientists and to do something that is politically expedient to them,” Mr. Flammia said.
In its statement on Wednesday, the F.D.A. said it recognized that some students might need a gradual transition period to stop using the shock device.
“The F.D.A. believes that state-of-the-art behavioral treatments, such as positive behavioral support and medications, can enable health care providers to find alternative approaches for curbing self-injurious or aggressive behaviors in their patients,” it added.
The Arc, a disability rights organization based in Washington, D.C., said in a statement on Wednesday that it celebrated the decision “after too long of a wait.”
“The F.D.A.’s decision, years in the making, to ban the use of the electric shock device is a hard-fought victory and a testament to what is possible when disability advocates fight their hardest for change and for the civil rights of people with disabilities,” said Peter Berns, the organization’s top executive. “We hope the ban is a significant step in ending the use of all aversive procedures on people with disabilities, who deserve to be supported with dignity.”
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6) Why Mexican Women Are Going on Strike on March 9
HTTPS://WWW.AMERICASQUARTERLY.ORG/CONTENT/WHY-MEXICOS-WOMEN-ARE-GOING-STRIKE-MARCH-9?FBCLID=IWAR2FGO4RWEZ8XAIVG3HEWO5S7X_LLDOUFUXZEPIT_QBS44YIW1CBI2HGBNI#.XMF9-WW4U3O.FACEBOOK
Eyepix/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The three of us – three women representing three different political parties as federal deputies in Mexico’s Congress – support the historic national women’s strike being convened by women’s groups and feminist organizations on March 9 in honor of International Women’s Day.
Here’s why we support the strike, and what we hope “A Day Without Women” – and the continued efforts of women’s social movements in Mexico – will achieve.
Every year on March 8, the world commemorates the early fights of working women in Chicago and New York, who demanded shorter working days, equal pay for equal work and the right to organize. Over the last 100 years, the demand for equality between men and women has continued and evolved. In Mexico, this year’s commemoration will conclude with a national strike to demand an end to the femicidal violence that every day takes the lives of 10 Mexican women, and to continue to insist that our rights and our lives be protected in every respect.
There are countless reasons why a strike is appropriate. Women are responsible for about half of the compensated economic activity in the country, and relied upon disproportionately for unpaid work in the home, which is roughly equivalent to 15% of Mexico’s GDP. In exchange, our rights are impaired or ignored. Women have become the protagonists of thousands upon thousands of stories of violence and impunity at the hands of men who, in public and in private, feel they have a right to decide over our lives and our bodies.
That should be enough to force any country to action. It hurts to see Mexico make international headlines because of the violence perpetrated against its women, and to see the state fail to articulate a plan to end this impunity and give women justice. That and many, many reasons more are why Mexico’s women will march in protest on March 8, and stop everything – stop working, stop asking, stop accepting – on March 9.
Women’s groups and feminist collectives in Mexico convened the national strike to make it clear where Mexico – its economy and its society – would be without women. But perhaps more importantly, the strike is intended to make us all feel the absence of the women who are taken from us, murdered on a daily basis, and through our silence make their voices heard.
The women’s strike is an initiative first and foremost of social movements, of organizations and collectives, born from civil society. We support that effort first as women, all of us conscientious of, and committed to, the common historical causes that link us together.
We are privileged to be part of this movement, which unites us in our diversity, to demand immediate, coordinated and meaningful action from all three branches of government to stop the systematic and structural violence that affects thousands of women and girls, and leaves a new void in our society every time a life is lost.
We support the strike as an exercise of our rights as women to protest in any form we see fit, without permission from patriarchal structures built on the belief that we need to ask them first, without regard for the condescension of machista culture that thinks it has a say over how we express ourselves, and without fear of the misogynist reaction we have come to expect from far too much of our society.
Instead we simply demand concrete action to stop the violence toward women in all aspects of life, to try to repair the damage done and to punish those responsible, to prevent future aggression through public policy aimed at defeating the machismo that still permeates relations between men and women.
In our role as legislators, too, we want to express our recognition, respect and support for the national women’s movement.
All three of us will continue to work to answer the demands and collective push for equal rights and lives free from violence. This is something that transcends political ideology.
In 2017, the Secretary General of the UN noted that gender equality was a central element of the 2030 Sustainable Development goals. Indeed, Objective 5 of the Agenda specifically refers to gender equality and empowerment for all women. In this, Mexico must redouble its efforts.
Despite undeniable strides in guaranteeing women’s political rights, and enjoying gender parity in Congress for the first time in Mexico’s history, there are many challenges left ahead if we are to overcome inequality and, above all, the numerous forms of violence committed against women.
Belonging to a “Legislature of Parity” obliges us to be responsible with all of the issues on our agenda, to work toward meaningful equality for women in all walks of life and to tend to the demands of society when it comes to security, justice and respect for women. For that reason, we are committed to pushing forward with current proposals already on the congressional agenda related to gender violence, femicide, equality and in-home childcare during the current legislative session. These issues cannot wait another day.
All that said, we are convinced that our role as legislators in this historic moment is to run in parallel – not over the top of – the social movements that have continued to push the cause of women forward. The women’s strike on March 9 is a reflection of righteous indignation and exhaustion with the conditions for women in this country. It should be nothing less than an inflection point in the transformation of Mexico and a catalyst for our work not just in Congress, but in every corner of the Mexican state.
Finally, we reiterate our respect and support for social movements pushing and protesting for Mexican women whose rights and lives have not been adequately protected. History has shown what women mean for our societies both individually and collectively. We need our women to be safe. We need our women to live.
#ElNueveNingunaSeMueve
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7) Paid to Stay Home: Europe’s Safety Net Could Ease Toll of Coronavirus
Europe’s social policies are sometimes seen as overly generous. Yet they may help cushion the economic impact of the virus.
"...in Denmark, the authorities said parents could take up to 52 weeks’ leave to care for a seriously ill child under age 18"
By Liz Alderman, March 7, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-coronavirus-labor-help.html
Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times
PARIS — Keeping your salary while caring for a quarantined child. Exercising the right to not work if you are afraid of getting ill. Sick-leave pay for up to six months.
Europe is sometimes considered a home of overly generous social policies. But as countries around the world scramble to control the deadly coronavirus outbreak, some analysts say those social programs and protective labor rules could serve as a powerful vaccine against the virus’s feared economic toll: recession.
Europe’s universal health care systems, for example, help bolster the economy by supporting consumer spending in the midst of a serious outbreak, because people aren’t worried about getting a big bill if they get sick.
“I would be more concerned in the U.S. what the cost would be,” said Ángel Talavera, an economist at Oxford Economics in London. “For Europeans, that is not a consideration we have in mind.”
Political leaders and central bankers have been full of assurances in recent days that they will do what it takes to blunt the impact and avoid a recession. An emergency cut in interest rates on Tuesday by the Federal Reserve sought to contain the fallout, but when or how much it would help was unclear.
But more than rate cuts or bursts of spending, economists say, the best short-term measures to prevent an economic downturn may be “automatic stabilizers” — existing programs or regulations that protect workers, provide low-cost health care or help companies get through a lean period. Some of these measures were adopted during another time of financial stress: the 2008 financial crisis.
Assurances that many workers won’t have to choose between caring for their health and paying their rent is a crucial psychological factor as Italy and France shut hundreds of schools, Britain unlocks an “action plan” to prevent the virus’s spread and businesses across the Continent cancel trips and meetings to limit their employees’ exposure to the epidemic.
Certainly, the benefits vary from country to country. And while Uber drivers, entrepreneurs and the self-employed in many European countries have access to health care at lower costs than in the United States, they still don’t get the same level of wage protection as salaried employees.
Italy announced Thursday that it would unleash a 7.5 billion euro (about $8.5 billion) support package to help businesses and families hit by the coronavirus, on top of €900 million in support announced last week.
The governments of most European countries are offsetting the cost of emergency sick leave for employers and aiding smaller companies that are scrambling to survive.
Most European governments require businesses to grant employees some form of paid sick leave. Germany, France, Denmark and the Netherlands are among the countries where workers have a right to receive full pay, in some cases for at least six weeks, if they are ill, are quarantined or are told to stay home by their employers.
In France, employees can also exercise what is known as “the right of withdrawal” from work by walking off the job if they believe their health and safety are at risk, without having wages docked or facing punishment.
Employees and their union at the Louvre Museum in Paris voted to stop working earlier this week, citing fears the virus could be spread by visitors. Management contested the move but couldn’t override it, keeping the world’s most visited museum closed for three days. Workers returned Wednesday after officials announced enhanced health security measures.
The virus’s economic costs are already tangible in Europe. For example, cancellation of the Geneva International Motor Show, which had been scheduled to open to the public on Thursday, deprives the European auto industry of one of its premier showcases and means the millions they spent on elaborate displays went to waste.
Some governments are moving more aggressively than others to offset the financial strain, especially for the small and medium-size firms that make up the bulk of economic activity in Europe, by providing tax breaks, extending deadlines for tax payments and easing access to government finance schemes.
France’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, this week offeredaffected businesses state financing to pay for partial unemployment benefits, as well as eased credit terms from BPI France, the state investment bank. France has declared the coronavirus a “force majeure,” meaning suppliers won’t be penalized for failing to fulfill government contracts.
In Italy, the epicenter of Europe’s coronavirus epidemic, the government promised to deploy measures it has used after earthquakes for 11 quarantined towns around northern Lombardy and Veneto, the so-called red zone of the outbreak, where some businesses are losing 100 percent of their income.
Among other support, the companies can get immediate access to unemployment benefits for furloughed workers and will be allowed to pay their taxes late, helping to mitigate a collapse in sales and production.
Others are holding back until the signs of economic damage are more clear. In Spain, officials said it was too early to take financial measures, with so much of the economic impact of the coronavirus in question. Germany’s finance minister, Olaf Scholz, promised this week that the government would take action if the outbreak hit the country’s already hard-pressed economy, but did not offer any specific proposals. There remains a deep reluctance in Germany to take on debt to pay for fiscal stimulus.
Yet countries where the spread of the epidemic shows no signs of slowing are pulling out the stops. France escalated its response this week as the coronavirus threat rippled through schools, rushing through new emergency measures allowing parents who can’t find child care to receive full pay while staying home with children who must be quarantined.
And in Denmark, the authorities said parents could take up to 52 weeks’ leave to care for a seriously ill child under age 18.
Employers in Britain were already required to grant time off if a relative or child fell ill under short notice. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced this week that the country’s mandatory sick-pay system would begin payments on the first day for people with suspected coronavirus, rather than the fourth day as for other illnesses. Critics pointed out that two million low-paid workers — those who earn less than 118 pounds weekly, or about $153 — did not make enough money to qualify for the help under Mr. Johnson’s plan.
The concerns highlight the uneven nature of such guarantees.
In one of the quarantined red zones of the Lombardy region in Italy, Taylan Arslan, 33, was forced to postpone the opening of a kebab-making plant after the government imposed a ban on all nonessential economic activity, leaving his 57 employees unable to go to work. Under the government’s emergency support plan, Mr. Arslan will be able to get access to unemployment benefits for his workers more easily and quickly.
Mr. Arslan would also get €500 in support. But the money would not be nearly enough to recoup the lost earnings for his business, even with the proffered tax breaks, he said. He estimated that he had lost €12,000, or about $13,500, per day.
The government “can keep their €500 a month,” he said, worrying about the tons of meat spoiling in his freezers. “I need to work.”
But Italy can go only so far. Government debt far exceeds annual output of the economy, and Rome cannot afford to lose the confidence of bond investors.
“In the short term, the government can help,” said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in White Plains, N.Y. “But the government can’t support people forever. At the end of the day, somebody has to pay for this.”
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8) The Open Borders Trap
Trump won’t stop talking and tweeting about them. But when it comes to immigration, what do Democrats actually believe?
"Breaking his promise to prioritize legalization, President Barack Obama instead set records for deportations — three million over eight years. Activists occupied offices of his re-election campaign and labeled him the “deporter in chief”"
By Jason DeParie, March 5, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/sunday-review/democrats-immigration.html
Illustration by Brea Souders; Photograph by Toya Sarno Jordan for The New York Times
Plunge into the progressive discourse on immigration, and you’ll quickly hear that it’s not enough just to legalize America’s 11 million unauthorized migrants, however cherished the goal may be and however long it has eluded reach.
Outraged at a president who has gone as far as seizing toddlers from their undocumented parents, a progressive vanguard seeks to decriminalize border crossing, ban deportations, end detention, “abolish ICE” (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) and make undocumented migrants eligible for government aid.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the progressive standard-bearer, likens detention facilities to “concentration camps.” Eight advocacy groups have released an immigration plan they call “Free to Move, Free to Stay,” a slogan that suggests no limits.
Eager to court activists, whom they consider influential with the Latino vote, the candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination moved sharply left from the party’s norms. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vows a moratorium on deportations and a move to “break up” ICE. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts joined him in pledging to make border crossings a civil, not criminal offense, before leaving the race this week. Both would include undocumented migrants in their plans for universal health insurance (as did the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., Pete Buttigieg, a moderate who also left the race recently).
Some Democrats fear the permissive tone will alienate voters who consider President Trump bigoted or cruel but want border control. Yet what’s notable about the progressives’ stance isn’t just the retreat on enforcement. It’s also the lack of an affirmative case for immigration — an argument for how it strengthens the economy, invigorates the culture and deepens ties to the world.
Nothing propelled Mr. Trump’s rise more than his attacks on immigration, yet some progressives reject the notion that immigration needs to be defended at all. If natives don’t have to justify their existence, why should the foreign-born?
“I think the question of good versus bad misses the point,” Cristina Jiménez, the director of United We Dream, a group that supports immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, told me. “Human flow is the reality as more people get displaced by globalization and climate change and people are fleeing poverty and oppressive countries.”
This reluctance to articulate immigration’s benefits is especially striking given how readily its critics cite its supposed harms. They say immigrants increase crime, lower wages, threaten jobs, spread disease, strain government budgets and abet terrorism. The point isn’t that these claims are all true — immigrants have crime rateslower than natives — just that critics make their case in clear, concrete terms.
By contrast, progressives defend immigration with bland abstractions — “our diversity is our strength” — if they defend it at all. Most approach the issue through a civil rights lens, as a matter of doing justice to the poor and oppressed (which it is) rather than meeting America’s economic needs or slowing demographic decline (which it can be as well).
“People on the left have a hard time arguing why immigration is important to the country,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group that explores ways to lower migration’s costs and increase its benefits. “This is still one of the most pro-immigrant societies in the world, but that diffuse feeling hasn’t been matched with a coherent, cogent, succinct political case.”
The border crisis commands so much attention that legal immigration and its benefits are regularly overlooked. Many Americans would be surprised to learn that three-quarters of immigrants are here legally.
With the foreign-born share of the population nearing record highs, and restrictionists seeking cuts in legal admissions, progressives can’t afford to remain merely anti-anti-immigrant. If they want to sustain the longest, most diverse epoch of mass migration in American history, they need to explain why.
To understand the progressives’ mind-set, it is important to understand their two-decade quest for legalization and its bitter residue.
If the right sees the undocumented as invaders, the left sees them as victims of poverty and violence. Even more, it sees them as family and friends. The average undocumented person has been in the United States for 15 years. Many have American children. Progressives warn that deportation campaigns destabilize entire communities, harming immigrants and natives alike.
“My mom is in deportation proceedings — for many of us this is personal,” said Erika Andiola of the legal services group Raices, who co-authored the Migrant Justice Platform, a set of policy recommendations that includes a deportation ban.
Progressives also say efforts to compromise have made matters worse. “Comprehensive immigration reform,” the Democrats’ strategy for many years, offered Republicans tougher enforcement in exchange for legalization. Republicans spurned deals twice (in 2007 and 2013), yet enforcement budgets soared — propelled, progressives say, by the “comprehensive” logic, which legitimized getting tough. Since 2003, the number of agents involved in internal removals has nearly tripled.
A Democratic president brought more disappointment. Breaking his promise to prioritize legalization, President Barack Obama instead set records for deportations — three million over eight years. Activists occupied offices of his re-election campaign and labeled him the “deporter in chief” — a rebuke that helps explain the candidates’ fear of activists’ wrath today. (More recent protests targeted the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer.)
Mr. Obama eventually used executive action to protect the so-called Dreamers — unauthorized migrants who arrived as children — and tried to restrain deportations by focusing on criminals. But he failed to win a broad legalization and left his anti-immigrant successor a formidable deportation machine.
If a leftist vanguard has radicalized, that’s partly because Mr. Trump’s violation of norms has been so radical. He muscled through two travel bans, mostly aimed at Muslim-majority countries. He cut refugee admissions to record lows. He rescinded the Dreamer protections, a move now before the Supreme Court. He dropped targeted deportations for a broader approach that officials boast is meant to spread fear.
In the biggest breach of norms, Mr. Trump separated nearly 3,000 children, including toddlers, from families illegally crossing the border, sending some to foster care in distant states (without telling their frantic parents where they were). Adding racialized insult to injury, he has called immigrants “rapists,” likened them to snakes, complained that they come from “shithole” countries and warned that African visa holders would never “go back to their huts.”
Faced with such relentless attacks, progressives say they’ve been too busy defending basic rights to focus on immigration’s broader benefits. “I think we’ve done a good job at pointing out the harms of the current immigration system,” said Deepak Bhargava, a longtime migrant rights leader now teaching at the City University of New York. “The question that has not been engaged enough is the centrality of immigration to the country’s future.”
But many progressives also reject the kind of arguments that supporters of immigration once made. An obvious case for immigration is economic: It has powered the rise of Silicon Valley, brought entrepreneurs to the inner city and staffed hospitals in the reddest and bluest of states.
Yet some on the left say economic arguments commodify immigrants or denigrate the native work force. “That frame pits workers against each other,” said Mary Small, the legislative director of Indivisible, a political organizing group. She prefers solidarity-based appeals that explain how “everyone’s humanity is tied up in the way immigrants are treated.”
“If you want me to give you some top-level G.D.P. number, that’s just not my voice,” said Lorella Praeli, a former Dreamer who is president of Community Change Action, a political organizing group that works with immigrants. “I would start with the story of self.”
More than the progressive groups they court, the Democratic presidential candidates do at least nod toward economic rationales. Ms. Warren says immigrants “grow our economy and make our communities richer.” Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg (who quit the race this week) both proposed special visas for immigrants willing to move to struggling areas.
Still, the candidates speak to the issue most passionately as a civil rights concern. In his eight-page plan, Mr. Sanders makes three perfunctory economic references — and nine pleas for racial justice. (Mr. Bloomberg, a notable exception, financed the nonprofit New American Economy to argue for immigration’s economic benefits.)
Few immigration narratives have inspired more sympathy than the story of the Dreamers — who are frequently described as children illegally brought to America “through no fault of their own.” But many Dreamers now reject that phrasing, for fear it implicitly faults their parents (just for seeking a better life). They have also shed their image as academic achievers to avoid elitist overtones. The logo of United We Dream once featured a diploma. Now it shows a bullhorn and a clenched fist.
“We grounded the organization in a much deeper analysis of racial justice,” said Ms. Jiménez, the group’s co-founder. “We do not separate our experience as immigrants from the experiences of brown and black people in this country.”
As he tried to rein in deportations, Mr. Obama drew moral distinctions, pledging to focus on “felons not families.” Some progressives call that phrasing a false dichotomy in a world that targets minorities for mass incarceration. Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders would reduce the crimes for which migrants could be deported (excluding what Mr. Sanders calls “old or low-level” offenses).
Rather than celebrate immigrant achievement, some activists call the “good immigrant” narrative a pernicious story line that requires newcomers to prove their worth. When the California attorney general, Xavier Becerra, praised Dreamers last year for becoming doctors and nurses, critics said he reinforced a harmful trope.
Cecilia Muñoz, a longtime immigrant rights advocate who served as Mr. Obama’s domestic policy adviser, argues that the left should embrace talk of good immigrants, not disparage it. “Talking about the contribution of immigrants is a way to win the hearts and minds of people we’re trying to reach,” she said.
Even the classic argument that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” now causes some people on the left unease. This framing seeks to normalize contemporary immigration by conjuring its precedents and subtly predicts its success — if the Irish and Italians made it, it suggests, so will the Mexicans and Hondurans.
But Ms. Jiménez rejects the triumphal narrative, arguing that immigrants, who are mostly people of color, have more in common with the oppressed people that story omits. “We’re also a nation of native people who were victims of genocide and African-American people who were brought here in slavery,” she said. “There’s something about the system that’s going after us for the color of our skin.”
Immigration poses a moral dilemma: There are more potential migrants than the country can accept. To the extent that they’re fleeing poverty and violence, it’s unfair to keep them out. But with nearly two billion people living on less than $3.20 a day, it’s impossible to let them all in. Hence the need to set limits and enforce them humanely.
That at least was the Democrats’ previous position. “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented and unchecked,” argued the 2008 Democratic platform, in what sounds like an artifact of a long-ago age. “We need to secure our borders.”
Today, many progressives offer only a hazy sense of how to grapple with limits. Indivisible is among the groups that favor a moratorium on deportations. Is that the same thing as open borders? “Hmm, that’s an interesting question,” said Ezra Levin, the group’s co-founder, before saying the answer is no.
Are deportations ever justified? “Folks are still trying to figure out where they’re at,” said Ms. Small.
Charles Kamasaki of UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza) warns that equivocation is a mistake. “We can’t make progress without acknowledging the legitimacy of basic immigrant enforcement, and that means some people who come here unlawfully will have to be returned,” he said.
In his recent book, “Immigration Reform,” Mr. Kamasaki, who has worked for migrant rights for nearly 40 years, advises other progressives to moderate their tone — to seek bipartisan compromise, avoid assuming all opponents are racist, and question whether “unfettered immigration is necessarily in their community’s interest.” (UnidosUS itself has subtly broadened its image, dropping “La Raza,” sometimes translated as “the race,” for a name that evokes national unity.)
However beneficial immigration may be, it can complicate other progressive goals, like expanding the safety net. The more poor immigrants the United States admits, the more expensive it is to provide free college or health care.
Yet few progressives see a need to consider trade-offs. “If your frame is that ‘there’s not enough resources,’ I’m just rejecting the question altogether,” said Ms. Praeli, the president of Community Change Action. “Our movement is grounded in abundance rather than scarcity.”
On the contrary, many progressives are pushing for safety net expansions that include the undocumented. Mr. Sanders was once an immigration skeptic who called open borders “a right-wing proposal” to undermine wages. Now hailed by some Latino supporters as “Tio Bernie,” he would include all immigrants, “regardless of immigration status,” not only in his plan for free health care but also free college, expanded school meals and other safety net programs.
Rather than grapple with limits, progressives seek to manage the numbers by addressing “root causes” — like “bad trade deals” (Mr. Sanders), “climate change” (Ms. Warren) or funding Central American wars (the Migrant Justice Platform).
The focus on root causes helps shift the moral frame — if America causes migration (which it often does), it’s more obligated to take migrants in. It also suggests a solution: If the United States helps poor countries prosper, migration may subside. All the Democratic candidates would increase development aid.
Reducing poverty is surely a good thing, but development is unlikely to slow migration, at least in the short run (though reductions in Central American violence would help). On the contrary, as the scholars Michael A. Clemens and Hannah M. Postel have shown, as incomes in poor countries rise, migration grows, because more people can afford to leave. Only after countries reach middle-income status do the numbers subside. It’s doable — Mexico did it — but it takes decades.
Perhaps the most discomfiting issue for progressives to face is the role of migration in Mr. Trump’s rise. If progressives deplore Trumpism, and immigration fueled it, should the left moderate its immigration demands?
Where fundamental justice is at stake, the movement is right not to bend. But not every immigration issue is a matter of high principle. Legalizing Dreamers is an issue with deep moral stakes. The diversity lottery — which gives 50,000 visas a year to people from underrepresented countries, regardless of family ties or special skills — is not. (Mr. Biden vows to retain it.)
Progressives say they are winning. Mr. Trump tried to make the 2018 elections a referendum on immigration, and Democrats captured the House. Surveys show support for immigration growing. Some progressives see parallels to California, where an immigration backlash in the 1990s incensed Latinos and turned the state blue.
“I don’t think the cruel nativism of Trump has won the day,” said Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, a group that supports legalization. “Just the opposite — it’s forced a choice and people are choosing.”
Perhaps. But the more immigration becomes part of the culture wars, the more its supporters have to lose. Immigration propelled Britain from the European Union and left Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany a lame duck. Immigration’s value can’t be assumed. It has to be defended.
I once asked a leading scholar of immigration what benefits it had brought America, beyond good food and affordable child care.
“Don’t underestimate the value of good food and child care,” he replied.
It was partly a quip — an acknowledgment that supporters of immigration hadn’t sufficiently explained its benefits and that some of those benefits privilege elites. But it was also the start of a serious argument: immigrants make everyday life better in concrete, measurable ways. Self-interest has always been part of what makes immigration in America work. Ellis Island has its place in national lore not only because it welcomed the huddled masses but also because those migrants and their descendants helped raise great cities, defeat Hitler and usher in the American century. Has any country grown richer, more powerful or more culturally vibrant from welcoming immigrants?
By all means, Democrats should insist that immigrants get justice. But they should also spell out the many ways — prosaic and profound — the country needs them.
Jason DeParle (@JasonDeParle), a reporter for The Times, is the author of “A Good Provider is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century.”
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9) With Coronavirus, ‘Health Care for Some’ Is a Recipe for Disaster
The Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants could make the epidemic worse.
By The Editorial Board, March 6, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opinion/coronavirus-immigrants-health.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Nicholas Konrad
In late January, as the new coronavirus was making its first incursion into the United States, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s contested “public charge” rule, which enables federal officials to deny green cards to immigrants who use social safety net programs. The decision received scant media attention, in part because it was overshadowed by the emerging epidemic. But public health experts warn that the two stories are intimately, perhaps disastrously, related: Infectious disease outbreaks have a long history of preying on society’s most vulnerable, disenfranchised members. Noncitizens who don’t have access to health insurance, nutritious food or safe, affordable housing fall squarely into that category.
Doctors and immigration advocates have long worried that the public charge rule would present a grave public health danger. The rule could deter millions of noncitizens — even those who were not technically subject to its provisions — from using programs like Medicaid, WIC and SNAP or from seeking medical care of any kind, lest they imperil their immigration status. That kind of avoidance would make those groups less healthy and thus more susceptible to the vagaries of, say, an infectious disease outbreak.
The administration was not blind to those risks. When it first proposed the new rule, officials at the Department of Homeland Security noted that it could very well lead to worse health outcomes for immigrants, especially infants, children and women who were pregnant or nursing. Yes, they acknowledged, vaccination rates might fall as a direct result of what they were proposing. Yes, communicable diseases might become more prevalent. But, the agency said, the new regulations were essential to a goal more important than protecting public health: making immigrants “self-sufficient.”
Many changes to law and policy have been undertaken in the past several years under the banner of “self-sufficiency” and its close cousin “personal responsibility.” Social safety net programs like SNAP and TANF have been cut; work requirements have removed thousands of people from Medicaid; and immigrant communities have been subject to a roster of anti-immigrant policies — not just the public charge rule, but also family separations and abysmal treatment of detained migrants at the border, and ICE raids and mass deportations at home.
The wisdom of each of those measures will be sorely tested now, as the coronavirus threatens to morph into a full-blown pandemic. More than 100,000 people across more than 80 countries have been infected with the new virus — and more than 3,400 of them have died, including at least 14 in the United States.
Proponents of closed borders and small social safety nets have a tendency to highlight the tension between citizen and noncitizen, to imply or explicitly state that the only way to help one group is to deprive the other. But the truth is, people on both sides are hanging by a thread.
Infectious diseases, especially those like Covid-19, have a knack for penetrating and exposing such false dichotomies. Already, citizens who are underinsured or uninsured are being slammed with medical bills that they can’t afford when they seek testing and treatment for the virus. Unsurprisingly, experts say that many of them are bound to avoid such care as the outbreak rages on. If quarantines become routine, tens of millions of low-wage workers, many of whom don’t have health insurance or paid sick leave, will not be able to stock up and stay home. One shudders to think what will happen if the courts dismantle the Affordable Care Act in the next year — a move that could ultimately leave 21 million or so more people without health insurance.
Among noncitizens, the effects of the public charge rule and other fear-based immigration policies have long been apparent. New mothers are turning away free baby formula. Hungry families are turning away food assistance. The chronically and even fatally ill are avoiding hospitals and rejecting medical care. In 2019, The Atlantic reported that at least 200 eligible families in a Virginia county had stopped accepting WIC and that many were also turning down reduced-price lunches. Both of those programs are exempted from the public charge rule — using them will not count against a person’s visa or green card application — but those families were too afraid to chance it.
It’s easy to see how all this fear might feed on itself in the months ahead and also where that might lead. If citizens struggling to cover their own health care nurture resentments against any group perceived to be getting help to which they themselves are not entitled — or worse, if they grow xenophobic and subscribe to the notion that immigrants carry diseases — they might be compelled to endorse policies even more draconian than those already in play. That would create more anxiety among noncitizen communities, which would lead to fewer people seeking medical care when they need it. From there, the epidemic would only get worse.
The best way to break this cycle of fear and further contagion is to dispense with zero-sum thinking and stitch together a safety net big enough, and strong enough, for everyone.
On Monday, more than 700 public health experts laid out clear steps for doing exactly that. Among other things, they called on the federal government to ensure that the outbreak response doesn’t exclude — or worse, penalize — the poor. The doctors and scholars advised officials not to cut existing safety net programs to pay for the work of battling the current outbreaks. They also asked that “particular attention and funding” be directed to local health centers in under-resourced communities; that diagnostic tests, and any future vaccines or treatments, be made widely available regardless of a person’s ability to pay; and that health care facilities be clearly designated as ICE-free zones. “Neither immigration status nor concerns over medical bills should deter people from seeking care right now,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and infectious-disease expert at the Yale School of Public Health.
That’s a moral position, but it’s also a practical one.
In 2018, before Covid-19 was known to humans, when the public charge rule was still just a proposal, Wendy Parmet, a professor of law and public health at Northeastern University, warned that the push for immigrant self-sufficiency would be both dangerous and quixotic. “None of us can be self-sufficient in the face of a widespread epidemic,” she wrote. “That is just as true for noncitizen immigrants as everyone.” In a pandemic, self-sufficiency can be self-deluding; our health is only as good as our most vulnerable neighbor’s.
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10) Transphobia Is Everywhere in Britain
It’s a respectable bigotry, on the left as well as the right.
By Juliet Jacques, March 9, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/opinion/britain-transphobia-labour-party.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Wiktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto, via Getty Images
LONDON — It must look odd to an outsider.
The race to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, after its traumatic defeat in December’s general election, has largely been conducted in the spirit of bury-the-hatchet pragmatism, to the point of tedium. The three candidates have promised, however sincerely, to maintain the general thrust of the party’s policy platform; divisions have mostly been a matter of tone, style and subtle implication. Rancor and controversy have been restrained among the candidates as well as the 500,000-strong membership. Except in one area: trans rights.
A contentious row began last month, when the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights announced itself with 12 pledges, which ranged from recognizing trans people’s oppression — at risk of hate crime and denied equal access to public services, health care, housing and employment — to supporting the expulsion of members who express transphobic views. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the candidate closest to Mr. Corbyn’s politics, and Lisa Nandy, the one farthest away, supported the campaign. The outcry was immediate: People started the hashtag #expelme on Twitter. Hecklers disrupted leadership hustings. And Tony Blair, a former leader and prime minister, warned of “the cul-de-sac of identity politics.”
To many, the sight of a center-left party failing to support trans rights without equivocation must be baffling — not least to American Democrats, whose party, divided in many ways, is firmly united in its support for trans and nonbinary people. But really, it’s no surprise. Transphobia, constantly amplified by the country’s mainstream media, is a respectable bigotry in Britain, shared by parts of the left as well as the right.
There are two main types of British transphobia. One, employed most frequently but not exclusively by right-wing men, rejects outright the idea that gender might not be determined only by biological traits identifiable at birth. This viewpoint can often be found in publications aligned with the Conservative Party, such as The Spectator, The Times and The Telegraph, all of which are looking for a new “culture war” to pursue now that the long, exhausting battle over Brexit has finally been resolved in favor of Leavers.
The other type, from a so-called radical feminist tradition, argues that trans women’s requests for gender recognition are incompatible with cis women’s rights to single-sex spaces. At its core, such an argument is not at odds with the first type — both rely on the conceit that trans and nonbinary people should not determine their own gender identities — but it is this second strain that is often expressed on the British left, from the communist Morning Star to the liberal New Statesman and The Guardian. Imported from American feminist circles during the 1970s, the argument is largely disowned in the United States. But it remains stubbornly persistent in Britain.
That is has done so owes much to the longevity of a generation of journalists who established themselves when the argument was orthodox. Many still hold influential roles as columnists or editors and have used their positions to keep the argument in the mainstream, while favoring a younger generation of writers who share their antipathy to trans people.
Younger trans and nonbinary people and their feminist allies have tried to shift the discussion onto the challenges we face in a transphobic society — with some success, especially in the early 2010s, when Trans Media Watch submitted a report to the Leveson inquiry into abuses of power by the British press. But that provoked an avalanche of commentary insisting that any discussion be returned to the intractable “debate” about whether trans and nonbinary identities (and especially those of trans women) were valid. Trans “activists” — anyone who questioned the terms of this “debate” — were characterized as an abusive mob and accused of silencing their critics, despite the fact that these critics could be heard advancing the same views in all major newspapers, every day, throughout the decade.
This counteroffensive reached its height in autumn 2018, as the Conservative government held consultations on reforms to the Gender Recognition Act, which had been passed in 2004. In response to demands for the bill to allow self-determination of trans and nonbinary identities, The Guardian — which as the country’s only center-left broadsheet newspaper plays an outsize role in political debate — published an editorial that attempted to find a center ground. But to do so, it took its framing and talking points from organizations implacably opposed to trans rights, as the writer Jules Gleeson noted. Many British trans writers, including me, have since declined to contribute to The Guardian, repeating a pattern played out in the New Statesman several years earlier.
The reforms to the Gender Recognition Act were shelved, topping off a dispiriting few years: The Leveson inquiry changed nothing, and none of the recommendations in a 2016 parliamentary report on transgender equality were brought in. Effectively excluded from mainstream liberal-left discourse and despairing of the possibilities for change under any Conservative government, trans and nonbinary people turned back to Labour as the only political institution potentially able to change both the conversation and legislation. That seemed especially possible after the narrow electoral defeat in 2017 offered hope that the party could soon take power on a platform of social democratic reform — led by someone who offered vocal, unwavering support for trans rights.
But John McDonnell, Mr. Corbyn’s long-term ally, was far more equivocal. And Labour’s 2019 manifesto, mostly more radical than two years earlier, included just a few lines on trans issues and hedged its bets about single-sex spaces and gender recognition. Such division and ambivalence isn’t confined to an older, outgoing generation: Laura Pidcock, regarded as a potential successor to Mr. Corbyn until she lost her seat in December, recently caused consternation by calling for “the space to talk about sex and gender, without fear of being ‘no platformed.’”
The intervention did not go without challenge: Many of Labour’s younger, more left-leaning members rejected the suggestion that trans rights were up for debate. So does much of the left. But the party — and the center-left coalition it contains — is far from united. Keir Starmer, the overwhelming favorite to win the leadership race who has based his campaign around “unity” above all else, tellingly attempted to bridge the divide: He offered rhetorical support for trans and nonbinary people while declining to sign on to the pledges.
But in the face of Britain’s unreformed and unrepentantly hostile media, and the virulent transphobia it endlessly churns out, calls for unity won’t be enough. Mr. Starmer — and the Labour Party — will have to decide whose support is worth keeping, and pick a side.
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11) U.S. Health Experts Say Stricter Measures Are Required to Limit Coronavirus’s Spread
With more than 500 cases in almost three dozen states, officials worry that containment efforts aren’t enough.
By Denise Grady, March 9, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/health/coronavirus-spread-united-states.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
As the coronavirus gained a foothold in the United States, thousands of employees from Seattle to Silicon Valley were told to work from home. Public school districts in several states have shut down, universities are moving classes to online only, and even churches are limiting services or prayer meetings. A global health conference in Orlando, Fla., planned for Monday, which President Trump was supposed to address, will no longer happen.
Off the California coast, another cruise ship with infected passengers is waiting for a place to dock. The State Department on Sunday advised Americans, especially those with underlying health conditions, not to travel on cruise ships.
As the coronavirus spread to two-thirds of the states, Americans began to grasp the magnitude of the threat facing them. The weekend’s case tally ballooned, veering toward nearly 600 cases and close to 20 deaths.
In Washington State, with the epicenter in the Seattle area, Gov. Jay Inslee said on Sunday that he was considering mandatory measures to help keep people apart. Federal public health officials also signaled that the degree of community spread — new cases popping up with no known link to foreign travel — indicated that the virus was beyond so-called containment in some areas and that new, stricter measures should be considered.
It’s a concept in public health known as shifting from containment of an outbreak to “mitigation,” which means acknowledging that the tried-and-true public health measures of isolating the sick and quarantining their contacts are no longer enough. So steps must be taken to minimize deaths from the disease and to slow its spread so that hospitals are not overwhelmed.
“You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, you know, anything is possible,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Fox News on Sunday. “And that’s the reason why we’ve got to be prepared to take whatever action is appropriate to contain and mitigate the outbreak.”
No one in the United States wants to use the word “lockdown,” in the manner of what Italy is doing in its northern regions to try to control the spread of the disease.
But the specter of isolation — of telling people in affected areas not to go out — is hovering in big cities where the infection has taken hold.
In an interview, Dr. Fauci said, “I don’t think you want to have folks shutting down cities like in northern Italy. We are not at that level. That is a hot spot. Social distancing like in Seattle is the way to go. I’m not talking about locking down anything. There’s a big difference between voluntary social distancing and locking anything down.”
If community spread is being detected now, that means it began, unseen, weeks ago. The greatest concern is for older people, particularly those who have underlying conditions like diabetes, heart disease, lung problems and weakened immunity.
“Don’t go to crowded places, think twice before a long plane trip, and for goodness sake don’t go on any cruises,” Dr. Fauci said.
For people who are particularly vulnerable, he said: “Don’t wait for community spread. Now is the time to do social distancing, whether there is spread in your community or not.”
If community spread has already started, as in Seattle, he said, everyone should practice social distancing.
“Everybody is going to be thinking about this, and trying to adapt it to their own circumstances,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. “‘Maybe I can attend this meeting virtually.’ A family that’s religious will think about being reverent at home rather than attending services with the rest of the congregation. Maybe we don’t go to the movies.”
One goal of mitigation is at least to slow down an epidemic, he said, adding, “If you can stretch things out long enough, you buy more time for the development of the vaccine and the research to be done for treatments.”
The cruise ship stranded off the coast of California will be allowed to dock on Monday in the port of Oakland at an as-yet-undecided time, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said at a news briefing on Sunday.
The site was chosen in part because of the ability to cordon off an 11-acre containment area at the port where the ship’s 2,421 passengers will disembark.
California residents, who make up around 40 percent of the passengers, will be transferred for a 14-day quarantine at military bases across the state, including the nearby Travis Air Force Base, where evacuees from China were quarantined last month. Passengers who are not from California will be flown to military bases in Texas and Georgia, the governor said.
Last week, 45 people were tested for coronavirus on the ship and 21 tested positive, 19 of them crew members.
Testing of the remaining passengers will be done in their quarantine areas, where they will remain for two weeks, officials said.
Foreign passengers will be sent home on charter flights from a section of Oakland International Airport where they can avoid contact with the general public, officials said at the briefing.
On Sunday afternoon advance medical teams were boarding the ship, Grand Princess, which is about 10 miles offshore, to assess the general health of passengers.
Most of the more than 1,000 crew members will remain onboard the cruise ship, which will leave the San Francisco Bay within about three days, Mr. Newsom said.
Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, said she had sought assurances that the ship would leave quickly and that there would be no local spread of the virus as a result of the ship’s docking at the Oakland port.
“This is a community that has suffered decades of environmental racism and injustice,” Ms. Schaaf said. “No one will be quarantined in Oakland or released to our community.”
Along with New York and Washington, California has the highest numbers of people infected with the virus.
Mr. Newsom said fewer than 1,000 people had been tested for the coronavirus in California and about 120 had tested positive. As the state ramps up its testing capabilities in the coming days, he expects the number of people confirmed to have the virus to increase.
In Washington State, the nursing home that has faced the brunt of the coronavirus outbreak thus far in the United States said on Sunday that it had seen some residents go from no symptoms to death in just a matter of a few hours.
Tim Killian, a spokesman for the nursing home, Life Care Center of Kirkland, said its medical staff had found the coronavirus to be troubling, volatile and unpredictable.
“It was surprising and shocking to us that we have seen that level of escalation from symptoms to death,” Mr. Killian said. He said the center was still in triage mode as it worked to get a handle on the issue for its remaining 55 residents.
On Sunday, health officials raised the death toll in Washington to 18, with 16 of those linked to Life Care, including 15 residents. Mr. Killian said other residents were in the process of getting test results, and six of them were ill.
Seventy of the center’s 180 staff members were out sick, but there weren’t enough test kits yet for them, he said. Three staff members have been hospitalized, one of whom has tested positive for the virus.
Some former government officials pointed out that the Trump administration was not acting quickly enough to stop the virus from spreading. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the federal government needed to step in quickly.
“There’s no systematic plan of when a city should close school, when they should tell businesses that they have to telework, when they should close movie theaters and cancel large gatherings,” he said. “We leave these decisions to local officials, but we really should have a comprehensive plan in terms of recommendations to cities and in some support from the federal government for cities that make that step, make that leap, if you will.”
Mike Baker, Thomas Fuller and Mitch Smith contributed reporting.
My New York Times comment:
"Tens-of-millions of people can't stay home, can't work from home, have no healthcare. childcare and no sick leave. If they don't work, they can't eat or pay their bills. Short of incarcerating everyone (and who would you get to work in these jails?) this "self-containment" is completely irrational because it already is not working and can't work. What's needed is massive, free healthcare coverage for everyone in every community—including distribution of food and a total moratorium on evictions and debt repayment for the duration of the epidemic—with no accumulated debt to be repaid. And, most of all, if this is really a deadly epidemic, all our resources—worldwide—should be devoted to finding a cure and vaccinations against it, instead of spending trillions of dollars on war and weapons of mass destruction. The government handling of this whole thing is irrational, ineffective and suspicious. We're not being told the truth because none of it makes any sense at all!" —Bonnie Weinstein
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/health/coronavirus-spread-united-states.html#commentsContainer&permid=105706712:105706712
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12) W.N.B.A. Star Maya Moore Helped Overturn His Conviction. ‘She Saved My Life.’
A judge in Missouri overturned the ruling against Jonathan Irons, who Moore and others said was wrongfully sent to prison for burglary and assault.
By Kurt Streeter, March 9, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/sports/basketball/maya-moore-jonathan-irons.html
Nina Robinson for The New York Times
Nina Robinson for The New York Times
A Missouri inmate whose appeal of his 50-year sentence for burglary and assault has been backed by the W.N.B.A. star Maya Moore had his conviction overturned by a state judge on Monday.
Before a packed courtroom in Jefferson City, Judge Daniel Green capped months of review by issuing a ruling that vacated the guilty verdict of the victim, Jonathan Irons, and ordered that he be released from the maximum security prison where he has been behind bars for the last 23 years.
Tears welled in Moore’s eyes as she sat in the front row, surrounded by nearly 20 members of her family and friends. “It felt so surreal,” she said, describing the moment in a brief interview shortly after the hearing was over. “We finally have justice. I was just thinking, ‘Did this really happen? Did it?’”
Moore — who in early 2019 stunned the basketball world byannouncing a hiatus from her career in large part to help Irons — was quick to note that the case is not over. The Missouri attorney general’s office and prosecutors in St. Charles County, where the crime took place, now have roughly 45 days to decide whether to appeal or retry the case. In that time, Irons’s lawyer will seek to have him released on bond.
The Missouri Attorney General’s office declined to comment on the case.
Whenever he gets out, Moore plans to be there. In January, the 30-year-old star of the Minnesota Lynx, one of the best players in basketball, announced that she was extending her leave from the game for at least another year, skipping another season for the Lynx and a chance to play in the Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
She reiterated Monday that she did not regret taking a break from basketball. “It is so sweet to see the redemption that came from stepping away and giving what I had to this case,” Moore said. “It feels like we are holding up that Final Four trophy, but there are still a couple of steps.”
Irons, now 40, grew close to members of Moore’s family through their volunteer prison work and ministry in the early 2000s. Moore met Irons in 2007, when she was about to begin what would be a stellar career at Connecticut, where she led her team to a pair of N.C.A.A. titles.
The two have been close friends ever since and share a sibling-like bond. Moore began speaking out for Irons’s release over the last several years.
Irons, born into severe poverty, was 16 when the crime for which he was convicted occurred. He was prosecuted for burglarizing a home in a St. Louis suburb and assaulting the homeowner with a gun. There were no corroborating witnesses, fingerprints, DNA, or blood evidence connecting Irons to the crime. Prosecutors claimed that Irons admitted to breaking into the victim’s home. Irons and his lawyers denied any such admission. The officer who interrogated Irons did so alone and failed to record the conversation.
Irons, who is African-American, was tried as an adult and found guilty by an all-white jury.
Judge Green’s decision Monday hinged on fingerprint evidence that had not been divulged by prosecutors in Irons’s initial trial. The fingerprints, found inside a door that would have been used to exit the house, did not belong to Irons or to the crime’s victim. Kent Gipson, Irons’s lawyer, argued that the state had withheld that evidence, which could have shown someone else was responsible for the crime.
Speaking over the phone from prison, Irons said he began crying, jumping and shouting as soon as he’d heard the news. “It feels like I can just breathe, like the weight of the world is off of me, like I have the chance to live.”
Asked about Moore, he was succinct: “She saved my life. I would not have this chance if not for her and her wonderful family. She saved my life and I cannot say it better than that.”
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13) Italy Announces Restrictions Over Entire Country in Attempt to Halt Coronavirus
All of Italy’s 60 million people are coming under restrictions that had earlier applied to the northern part of the country.
By Jason Horowitz, March 10, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/world/europe/italy-lockdown-coronavirus.html
Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images
ROME — Italy on Monday became the first European country to announce severe nationwide limits on travel as the government struggled to stem the spread of a coronavirus outbreak that has hobbled the economy, threatened to overwhelm public health care and killed more people than anywhere outside China.
The measures, announced in a prime time news conference by the country’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, sought to adopt the kind of drastic limits that may be working to control the virus in China, an authoritarian regime.
But the scope of the clampdown in Italy, applied to roughly 60 million people — from islands in the south to the Alps in the north — immediately raised the question of whether an entire modern European nation protective of its individual freedoms would make the necessary sacrifices.
The broader restrictions came just hours after the authorities announced that 9,172 people had been infected by the virus, 1,598 more than the day before. Deaths climbed to 463 people, the majority of whom are overwhelmingly elderly and sick people. There were 97 more deaths since Sunday.
As of Tuesday, permission would be necessary for Italians who sought to move around the country for reasons of work, health or extenuating circumstances. The same criteria would be applied for Italians looking to leave the country, but Mr. Conte suggested that foreigners could still come to Italy.
More concretely, he said that schools and universities would remain closed as a result until at least April 3. Decrees banned jail visits and day-release programs for inmates, setting off riots across the country at 27 prisons. Guards were held hostage, and several inmates died in Modena.
All sports events and outdoor gatherings would now be forbidden. A 6 p.m. curfew on bars, currently in place in the northern areas, would be extended to the whole country. The days of young people gathering at outdoor events and pubs were over, he said.
“We all have to renounce something for the good of Italy,” said Mr. Conte, announcing that the government would enact stronger, more stringent rules than had been introduced just over a day earlier to the country’s wealthy north. He said the classifications between levels of threat in different regions and provinces would be replaced by a blanket restriction on nonessential movement across the country that he called “Italy, protected zone.”
As he attempted to rally Italians to abide by the measures, Mr. Conte emphasized that the outbreak, Europe’s worst, presented an existential threat to the country’s elderly population — the Continent’s oldest — and to the health care system that served them.
The sudden expansion of travel restrictions reflected the government’s effort to catch up to the spread of a virus that has consistently outpaced its efforts to contain it.
After the virus first appeared more than two weeks ago, the government first locked down 11 towns, but deaths and cases continued to spike.
Early Sunday, it announced that it would restrict the movement of about a quarter of Italy’s population, locking down the region of Lombardy and risking its northern economic heart for the health of the entire country and the survival of an overwhelmed health care system.
But those measures, already enormous in scope, have not stalled the virus’s toll. Instead, they have prompted confusion and anxiety as vague instructions from officials undercut the government’s assertions of control and authority.
Different regions had enforced different measures, politicians offered different definitions of what “movement” meant, and internet rumors spread unsubstantiated — and, the authorities said, false — accounts of overburdened hospitals denying care to anyone over 60. Riots broke out in 27 prisons, with guards held hostage and several inmates dying, in part because the decree had banned jail visits and day-release programs for inmates.
Residents in and out of the locked-down areas of the north expressed bewilderment at what they could or could not do, or should do, to protect themselves.
“We are hearing too many things, and people don’t really get what’s going on,” said Laurence Paretti, 56, who window-shopped in Milan, where she taught yoga. She said she assumed it was fine to take a walk around the city but said that the government’s explanations “aren’t clear at all.”
Mr. Conte acknowledged that a change was necessary on Monday night, as he introduced what he called stronger and broader restrictions. “We have to do it immediately,” he said.
Giovanni Rezza, director of the infective illness department at the National Health Institute, called the decision “necessary” and suggested that European neighbors such as France and Germany should follow suit.
He said Italy was essentially faced with two choices, a Wuhan-style lockdown in which people could not leave their towns, including in the economic capital of Milan, or the option the government took, imposing partial travel restrictions and social distancing by closing bars and sporting events and thus keeping people away from one another.
Mr. Rezza, who on Monday morning raised the alarm of the virus hitting Rome, said he believed the government feared an epidemic in the less developed south. “There is a huge scare that the virus spreads to southern regions,” where the health care system is much inferior to the one in the north, he said.
In Milan, the police stopped cars and asked drivers to fill out forms explaining where they were going and why, but it was not immediately clear how broadly, or seriously, the new measures would be applied or enforced.
In a reflection of how the spread of the virus had evolved into a national emergency, the government’s decree received support across the political spectrum.
Matteo Salvini, the opposition leader of the nationalist League party, who had pressed Mr. Conte earlier in the day to expand the restrictive measures to the whole country, responded with measured approval. But he also said Mr. Conte needed to be clearer, and that it was necessary “to close everything and immediately, without leaving space for doubts or interpretations.”
Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister, had criticized the government’s failure to effectively communicate the importance of the previous restrictions. He too said he had urged the government to expand the measures to all of Italy to stop the virus from spreading across the country and deeper into Europe. He said in an interview on Monday night that he thought Italians would now better obey the new decree “because now it’s all of Italy. It’s not one part divided from the other. You have to do it for everybody.”
Mr. Conte, a former ally of Mr. Salvini, was until two years ago a little known law professor. Now he finds himself leading the country during its greatest challenge in recent history. He has a circular and legalistic speaking style and a habit for complimenting himself on his clarity.
But on Sunday and Monday, he confused many Italians by citing the language in the decree limiting movement in the north, speaking about an “obligation for all the physical persons who enter or exit the area” to “avoid every movement.” It sounded draconian but allowed for plenty of wiggle room.
Travel continued in and out of the north by car, train and plane. The country’s response remained fragmented. Regions in the middle and south developed their own restrictions, some of them significantly tougher than those on the north.
To help explain the decree, the Interior Ministry published “auto-certification” forms that anyone traveling from or to the locked-down areas needed to fill out and present when asked by the authorities to attest that they needed to travel for work, or health or “other necessities.”
In the towns around Milan, Italy’s economic and cultural capital, that had suffered the largest outbreaks and been strictly sealed, Sunday’s restrictions had actually eased the local lockdowns.
Even some of the mayors of the towns were confused on Monday afternoon and lamented soldiers leaving the checkpoints.
“I am a bit worried because the effort we did during the quarantine could be wasted,” said Elia Delmiglio, the mayor of Casalpusterlengo, where quarantine rules were lifted. “If you do not have a circumscribed area anymore, some positive people could bring the virus around and infect other people.”
Massimo Galli, who heads a team of doctors who identified the Italian strain of the virus last month at the Biomedical Research Institute of Milan, has said reopening those towns was “crazy.”
The measures introduced on Sunday, he said in an interview, were “not enough” for areas that had been quarantined red zones.
“What they did in Wuhan is far more drastic than what we did,” he said, adding that he worried about “fire brewing under the ashes, that in other parts of the country you can have the surprise of epidemics that circulated for a time, without giving any signs.”
But other virologists believed Italy had on Monday night done what it needed to do.
Roberto Burioni, one of Italy’s leading virologists, said that Italy had underestimated the contagiousness of the virus, so the government needed to act decisively and Italians needed to respond responsibly.
“The only way to contain this virus, is to betray our culture which is social,” he said, adding “the virus is exploiting these characteristics, and we have to do everything we can to stop it.”
Mr. Conte clearly counted on, and appealed to, Italy’s sense of civic duty, saying “everyone must do their part” to stop the spread of the virus. “The right decision is to stay home.”
Not long before Mr. Conte spoke, Paola De Caria, 60, returned to her home in Milan from visiting her 90-year-old mother and fighting with a friend who took the virus too lightly. She said she wasn’t “really sure” what the rules were but “it all comes down to common sense. I have an aging parent, I shop for her and bring her food, avoid cafes and places like that.”
Anna Momigliano contributed reporting from Milan, and Emma Bubola and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.
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14) Chelsea Manning Tries to Kill Herself in Jail, Lawyers Say
Ms. Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst jailed for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, was hospitalized, according to her lawyers.
By Michael Levenson and Charlie Savage, March 11, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/us/chelsea-manning-suicide-attempt.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage
Cliff Owen/Associated Press
Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who was jailed last year for refusing to testify before a grand jury that is investigating WikiLeaks, has been hospitalized after she attempted suicide on Wednesday, according to her lawyers.
Ms. Manning, 32, is currently recovering, according to her lawyers, who did not say how Ms. Manning tried to kill herself while at a detention center in Alexandria, Va., where she has been held since May.
The Alexandria Sheriff’s Office confirmed only that there was “an incident” involving Ms. Manning at 12:11 p.m. and said, “It was handled appropriately by our professional staff and Ms. Manning is safe.”
A statement from Ms. Manning’s legal team said she was still scheduled to appear on Friday at a hearing before Judge Anthony Trenga of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
At the hearing, the judge is expected to rule on whether to end the civil contempt sanctions imposed on Ms. Manning after she refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the publication of thousands of American military and diplomatic files that she had provided to WikiLeaks in 2010.
Ms. Manning was also detained for two months starting in March 2019 for refusing to testify, then briefly released when that grand jury’s term ended — taking advantage of the window to announce that she had a book deal that she said would focus on her personal life. But prosecutors subpoenaed her again for testimony before a new grand jury, and she again refused to testify and was locked up again.
“In spite of those sanctions — which have so far included over a year of so-called ‘coercive’ incarceration and nearly half a million dollars in threatened fines — she remains unwavering in her refusal to participate in a secret grand jury process that she sees as highly susceptible to abuse,” said the statement from Ms. Manning’s legal team.
“Ms. Manning has previously indicated that she will not betray her principles, even at risk of grave harm to herself,” the statement said.
Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the office of the United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, declined to comment.
A federal prosecutor had previously said that the Justice Department did not want to have Ms. Manning detained, but she had a legal obligation to testify before a grand jury when subpoenaed.
Ms. Manning has attempted suicide at least two previous times, both in 2016 — once while in solitary confinement at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., which was itself a punishment for an earlier attempt to end her life that year.
“Her actions today evidence the strength of her convictions, as well as the profound harm she continues to suffer as a result of her ‘civil’ confinement,” Ms. Manning’s lawyers said in their statement on Wednesday.
The grand jury investigation is part of a long-running inquiry into WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, that dates to the Obama administration and which the Trump administration revived.
Ms. Manning said that when she appeared before the grand jury, prosecutors had asked her questions about WikiLeaks, but she refused to answer every question, saying it violated her constitutional rights.
Although prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia granted immunity for her testimony, Ms. Manning had vowed not to cooperate in the investigation, saying she had ethical objections. A federal judge ruled that she must stay in civil detention until she testified.
In a letter last year to Judge Trenga, Ms. Manning described the investigation as “an effort to frighten journalists and publishers, who serve a crucial public good.”
Before her current incarceration, Ms. Manning served seven years in a military prison, including 11 months of solitary confinement, the statement said.
She was originally convicted in 2013 of providing more than 700,000 government files to WikiLeaks, exposing American military and diplomatic affairs around the world.
President Barack Obama intervened in her case in 2017, commuting all but four months of her 35-year sentence.
During Ms. Manning’s trial in 2013, testimony showed that she had been deteriorating, mentally and emotionally, during the period when she downloaded the documents and sent them to WikiLeaks. Then known as Pfc. Bradley Manning, she was struggling with gender dysphoria under conditions of extraordinary stress and isolation while deployed to the Iraq war zone.
Last year, the Justice Department unsealed criminal charges against Mr. Assange, who had been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London but was arrested. Prosecutors initially charged him with a narrow hacking conspiracy offense, for purportedly agreeing to try to help Ms. Manning crack a password that would have let her log onto a military computer system under a different user name, and cover her tracks.
But prosecutors later drastically expanded the case against Mr. Assange by bringing charges against him under the Espionage Act for soliciting, receiving and publishing classified information — an unprecedented effort to deem such journalistic activities (a separate issue from the debate over whether Mr. Assange himself counts as a journalist) as crimes that raise novel First Amendment issues. Mr. Assange has been fighting extradition in a London court.
The criminal case against Mr. Assange does not involve his later actions in publishing Democratic emails, stolen by Russian hackers, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Sandra E. Garcia and John Ismay contributed reporting.
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15) Going to Work With Danger, and Maybe Death, Every Day
By Julia Rothman and Shaina Feinberg, March 12, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/business/construction-death.html
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