7th Annual Reclaim MLK's Radical Legacy Weekend
https://www.antipoliceterrorproject.org/reclaim-mlk-2021
Gather your friends and family. Reach out to your schools, unions, churches and other organizations. On Monday, January 18, join the Anti Police-Terror Project for the 7th Annual March to Reclaim MLK's Radical Legacy!
This year’s Reclaim “march” will be a car caravan that begins at the Port of Oakland, makes its way down International/E14 and ends in East Oakland with a short program.
Reclaim MLK Weekend - January 15-17
Reclaim MLK March - January 18
For seven years running, the APTP Reclaim MLK event has been the only MLK March in the city of Oakland and brings together thousands of people across race, class and political ideology with a commitment to build a just and equitable Oakland that Dr. King would be proud of.
For decades, MLK’s legacy has been whitewashed. Often portrayed as a passive figure, in truth he was a radical leader demanding rational change: an end to capitalism, to war, to empire, to poverty, and to white supremacy. Communities in Oakland and across the country take this opportunity every year to celebrate the true spirit of this revolutionary. We intend to follow in his legacy through our campaign to defund the police and refund the community.
This year’s theme is Re-Imagine. Reimagine and remember King’s unrealized dream.
The work to Refund. Restore. Reimagine our communities is a modern-day reflection of King’s work, legacy and unfulfilled dream. He said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” That’s Oakland’s budget every year. As we reimagine what public safety means in Oakland — violence interruption, housing as a human right, living-wage jobs with dignity, good schools, clean streets and parks, mental health care and crisis support, and thriving communities — we are making King’s Dream a reality.
We acknowledge that the pandemic is still raging through our communities. We will take this seriously. But we also acknowledge the essential work of defunding OPD in order to eradicate police terror. Police terror, like the pandemic, is a public health emergency.
And that’s why we still plan to hit the streets on MLK Day and Weekend but will do so in a car caravan that envelopes our whole city as we ride from the Port to Eastmont Mall.
On Monday, January 18, we will take action to demand:
· Cut OPD’s allocation from the General Fund by 50% (roughly $150 Million);
· Redirect funds to invest in housing, jobs, youth programs, restorative justice, mental health workers and other services that actually keep us safe.
· Discontinue unauthorized overtime by OPD;
· An immediate response to the violence in our streets that is NOT rooted in the carceral state.
Email us if you'd like to get involved in the planning: aptpinfo@gmail.com.
© 2020 ANTI POLICE-TERROR PROJECT
aptpinfo@gmail.com
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Morning After
It’s never been the people’s house
those are not built by slaves
or hosts to Indian killers,
rapists of the earth, segregationists
war mongers, women haters
Not the people’s house at all
This true history unravels what might seem to be a mystery
why the forces of law and order
(so vicious against Blacks and at the border)
used such kid gloves
as though they loved
the horned, invading Confederacy-flagged forces of disorder.
No “innocent blood” was shed
despite what the Capitol’s chaplain said.
A photo showed a few
(all day they arrested only 52)
uncuffed and face down on the floor
most of the others only asked to leave
(while the day before the Blake family had to grieve
that the cops who put seven bullets in Jacob’s back
would not be charged for their attack)
Alas this is not at all difficult to believe!
Spin artists are already busy
so fast I’m getting dizzy
trumpeting that “our democracy”
(sick with Covid-19 and an inhuman economy)
at dawn’s early light was ratified
when Biden’s election had been certified
But their complacency is lunacy!
Who’d want that kind of normalcy
festering for all to see?
The boil’s popped and out came the puss
posing big questions for the rest of us.
As Republicans and Democrats scurried like rats on broken glass
soiling their silk undies while trying to save their ass
while the police they trained
allowed the aspiring brown shirts so easily to pass
(showing us exactly what about the thinking of the ruling class?)
Trump is posturing to be the strong man
the only one who can
resolve this new morass.
Some say this makes him a candidate for the 25th Amendment.
Such naivete!
about this aspiring descendent
of fascism’s menacing precedent.
Pete
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San Francisco BAY AREA Car Caravan
END U.S. Support for WAR on YEMEN
January 25, 2021
On January 25th, 2021 almost 200 organizations around the world are calling on people to have online or COVID safe in-person actions for Yemen. Take action for Yemen on January 25th and make sure governments around the world hear loud and clear: the world is saying NO to war on Yemen!
In solidarity with the Global call to action we invite you to participate in a S.F. Bay Area Car Caravan on January 25
WHAT: Car Caravan to end Support for War on YEMEN
DATE: Monday January 25, 2021
TIME: 12 PM PST – 2 PM PST
LOCATION: Starting Point at 444 Spear St, San Francisco, CA
San Francisco BAY AREA Car Caravan
END U.S. Support for WAR on YEMEN
January 25, 2021
On January 25th, 2021 almost 200 organizations around the world are calling on people to have online or COVID safe in-person actions for Yemen. Take action for Yemen on January 25th and make sure governments around the world hear loud and clear: the world is saying NO to war on Yemen!
In solidarity with the Global call to action we invite you to participate in a S.F. Bay Area Car Caravan on January 25
WHAT: Car Caravan to end Support for War on YEMEN
DATE: Monday January 25, 2021
TIME: 12 PM PST – 2 PM PST
LOCATION: Starting Point at 444 Spear St, San Francisco, CA
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Sunday, Jan. 10, 7pm - Festival of Hope for Patrick O'Neill
We invite you to a virtual Festival of Hope on Sunday at 7 pm (Eastern) for Patrick O'Neill as he enters prison for the disarmament action at the Kings Bay Trident base in Georgia more than two years ago. He is scheduled to report to the federal prison in Elkton, OH on January 14 to serve the remaining 12 months of his 14 month sentence. Judge Wood recently denied his request for a delay until he could be vaccinated.
The program will feature talks from Jeannine Hill-Fletcher, a professor of religion at Fordham University who testified at the Religious Freedom Restoration Act hearing and Paul Magno, a fellow plowshares activist with Patrick in the Pershing Plowshares in 1984. Steve Dear will present a slideshow. Some of the other KBP7 are expected to speak.
Music will be provided by Luci Murphy, blues guitarist Scott Ainslie and by Patrick's daughters, Annie and Veronica. There will be a concluding blessing from Fr. Bob Cushing.
Zoom Link Changed for Sunday's Festival of Hope for Patrick O'Neill
We are looking forward to the virtual Festival of Hope on Sunday at 7 pm (Eastern) for Patrick O'Neill but have had to change the Zoom link. He is about to begin a prison sentence for the disarmament action at the Kings Bay Trident base in Georgia more than two years ago. He is scheduled to self report to the federal prison in Elkton, OH on January 14 to serve the remaining 12 months of his 14 month sentence. Judge Wood recently denied his request for a delay until he could be vaccinated.
The new link to join the webinar (via Code Pink):
Zoom Link Changed for Sunday's Festival of Hope for Patrick O'Neill
We are looking forward to the virtual Festival of Hope on Sunday at 7 pm (Eastern) for Patrick O'Neill but have had to change the Zoom link. He is about to begin a prison sentence for the disarmament action at the Kings Bay Trident base in Georgia more than two years ago. He is scheduled to self report to the federal prison in Elkton, OH on January 14 to serve the remaining 12 months of his 14 month sentence. Judge Wood recently denied his request for a delay until he could be vaccinated.
The new link to join the webinar (via Code Pink):
The festival will be recorded and posted to Youtube afterwards. If you do not want to be seen please turn off your video. Check the website for link.
Patrick will also be speaking at a webinar on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 7pm (Eastern) on "Resisting Militarism, Embracing Peace; Plowshares and Palestine." It is sponsored by Voices for Justice in Palestine. The link to register is at: https://sites.google.com/view/vjpweb
Carmen Trotta #22561-021
FCI Otisville
Federal Correctional Institution
Satellite Camp
PO Box 1000
Otisville, NY 10963
Martha Hennessy #22560-021
FCI Danbury
Route 37
Danbury, CT 06811
You can send letters to them on white paper with blue or black ink but no drawings. We are checking what else they may receive. See the website for updates.
Clare Grady and Patrick O'Neill will report to prison in the New Year. Mark Colville has a delay for sentencing until February 19.
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U.S. Executes Lisa Montgomery for 2004
Murder
She was the first woman to be put to death by the federal government since 1953 and had been the only woman on federal death row.
By Hailey Fuchs, Jan. 13, 2021
Lisa M. Montgomery, 52, was the only woman on federal death row. Credit...Attorneys for Lisa Montgomery, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration early Wednesday morning executed Lisa M. Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, whose death marked the first federal execution of a woman in nearly 70 years.
Ms. Montgomery, 52, was sentenced to death for murdering a pregnant woman in 2004 and abducting the unborn child, whom she claimed as her own. In pleas to spare her life, Ms. Montgomery’s supporters argued that a history of trauma and sexual abuse that marred her life contributed to the circumstances that led to the crime. Her case, unusual in part because so few women are sentenced to death, ignited debate over the role of offenders’ past trauma in criminal sentencing.
Despite a series of court orders that briefly blocked her execution, she was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind., the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement. Her death, by lethal injection, is the 11th execution since the Trump administration resumed use of federal capital punishment in July after a 17-year hiatus.
According to a spokesperson for the defense team, Ms. Montgomery was transported, fully shackled, from a federal medical center in Texas to Terre Haute on Monday night. The federal penitentiary where the vast majority of federal death row prisoners are housed is an all-male facility, and an official said in a court declaration that the Bureau of Prisons planned to house Ms. Montgomery at the execution facility, where she would be the only inmate.
Shortly before Ms. Montgomery’s death, a female prison staff member gently removed Ms. Montgomery’s face mask and asked if she had any last words, to which Ms. Montgomery responded, “No,” according to a report from a journalist in attendance.
Under a pseudonym, Ms. Montgomery — who had falsely told others that she was pregnant — expressed interest in buying a dog from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a rat terrier breeder in Skidmore, Mo. But after she arrived at Ms. Stinnett’s house, Ms. Montgomery strangled her, used a knife to cut her abdomen and extracted the fetus, then claimed the child as her own.
The baby girl lived and turned 16 last month on the anniversary of her mother’s death. At least some of those close to Ms. Stinnett or the case said Ms. Montgomery’s execution was a just conclusion to a crime that had haunted the northwest Missouri community for years.
Richard Chaney, 38, a childhood friend and classmate of Ms. Stinnett’s, recalled biking to the local gas station with her, describing how in high school she had a “huge crush” on the man who would later become her husband.
Mr. Chaney rejected the idea that the abuse suffered by Ms. Montgomery should have led to her life being spared, saying many people endured trauma without committing heinous crimes. “You don’t see them out killing pregnant women and cutting babies out,” he said.
“I get, you know, people like, ‘Death penalty’s wrong,’ but at what point do you excuse something like this?” he asked, several days before Ms. Montgomery was put to death. “I think, you know, it’s not right always to say an eye for an eye, but I think the community’s hurt enough that it would definitely help with some closure.”
Still, Ms. Montgomery’s lawyers cited the repeated physical and sexual abuse she endured as a child in pleas for leniency, arguing that President Trump would affirm the experiences of abuse survivors by commuting her sentence to life imprisonment. Her mother forced her to “pay the bills” through sexual acts with various repairmen, and her stepfather regularly subjected her to sexual abuse, a clinical psychologist said in a court declaration filed by her defense team.
Women are scarce on death row in the United States. According to a quarterly report from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, just 2 percent of those inmates on death row are women. With Ms. Montgomery’s execution, there are now no women on federal death row.
The last women to be executed by the federal government were Bonnie Brown Heady for kidnapping and murder and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, both in 1953.
Ms. Montgomery’s execution was originally scheduled for last month. But after two of her lawyers contracted the coronavirus, a judge delayed it, and the Justice Department rescheduled.
In her final days, Ms. Montgomery found some fleeting reprieve in the courts. Her lawyers had claimed that she was incompetent for execution, citing mental illness, neurological impairment and complex trauma. A federal judge in Indiana issued a stay on Monday night so that the court could conduct a hearing to determine her competency. But a panel on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated that stay on Tuesday, writing that Ms. Montgomery’s claim could have been brought earlier. The judges also cited Supreme Court precedent, which emphasizes that last-minute stays of execution “should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”
Still, other court orders continued to block her execution well after the Bureau of Prisons’ tentatively scheduled execution time of 6 p.m. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a separate stay so that the court could hear her claim related to the Federal Death Penalty Act, and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals issued its own stay.
But the Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to proceed, as it has done with the previous 10 inmates executed by the Trump administration. On Tuesday, the court overturned both stays, the remaining barriers to her execution, and rejected each of Ms. Montgomery’s requests for reprieve.
In a lengthy statement early Wednesday morning, Ms. Montgomery’s longtime lawyer Kelley Henry maintained that the government violated the law by executing her client, who suffered from “debilitating mental disease.” Beyond the crime for which she expressed remorse and the abuse she endured, Ms. Henry said, Ms. Montgomery was a Christian who adored her family.
Ms. Henry — who tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after visiting Ms. Montgomery — also contended that the executions themselves, what she called “superspreader events,” demonstrated the administration’s “reckless disregard for human life of innocent citizens.”
“Because this administration was so afraid that the next one might choose life over death, they put the lives and health of U.S. citizens in grave danger,” she said, in part. “We should recognize Lisa Montgomery’s execution for what it was: the vicious, unlawful and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power. We cannot let this happen again.”
Two more federal inmates are scheduled for execution this week: Corey Johnson on Thursday and Dustin J. Higgs on Friday. A federal judge in the District of Columbia blocked their executions in a preliminary injunction on Tuesday that the government has already appealed.
If the prisoners do not succeed in their pleas for delays or clemency, their deaths could be the last federal executions for some time. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose inauguration is set for Jan. 20, has signaled his opposition to the federal death penalty.
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Defend Kshama Sawant
Freedom Socialist Party Editorial: DECEMBER 2020
Seattle’s lone socialist city councilor is again under attack. Kshama Sawant had the audacity to demand Mayor Jenny Durkan resign after unleashing the cops against Black Lives Matter protesters. In retaliation Durkan instigated a recall of Sawant.
The recall against Durkan was tossed out by the courts, but not the one against Sawant … interesting.
Democrats and downtown businessmen have tried for years to get rid of Sawant. Why? Because she was able to get a tax, albeit a small one, on corporations like Amazon.
In 2020, Durkan tried unsuccessfully to convince the council to investigate Sawant for “disorderly” behavior. This time around Sawant is charged with collaborating with her political party, Socialist Alternative, rather than taking orders from the Mayor! How hypocritical. And ridiculous. The rest of the city council takes directions from the Democratic Party kingmakers but that’s okay. This is anti-communist redbaiting plain and simple, and part of an anti-left hysteria sweeping the country.
Sawant is really under attack for challenging the status quo. This recall needs to go down in flames. End redbaiting. Defend Kshama Sawant!
To show support for Sawant, visit Decline to Sign – Kshama Solidarity
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
- Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
- San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
- Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
Know Your Rights Materials
The NLG maintains a library of basic Know-Your-Rights guides.
- Know Your Rights During Covid-19
- You Have The Right To Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Encounters with Law Enforcement
- Operation Backfire: For Environmental and Animal Rights Activists
WEBINAR: Federal Repression of Activists & Their Lawyers: Legal & Ethical Strategies to Defend Our Movements: presented by NLG-NYC and NLG National Office
We also recommend the following resources:
Center for Constitutional Rights
Civil Liberties Defense Center
- Grand Juries: Slideshow
Grand Jury Resistance Project
Katya Komisaruk
Movement for Black Lives Legal Resources
Tilted Scales Collective
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The ability of a handful of people to control our public discourse has never been more obvious.
By Kevin Roose, Jan. 9, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/trump-twitter-ban.html
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, at a Senate hearing in October. Mr. Dorsey, along with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, has been under increasing pressure to hold President Trump accountable. Credit...Pool photo by Greg Nash
In the end, two billionaires from California did what legions of politicians, prosecutors and power brokers had tried and failed to do for years:
They pulled the plug on President Trump.
Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Mr. Trump’s account on Friday “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” after a decision a day earlier by Facebook to ban the president at least through the end of his term, was a watershed moment in the history of social media. Both companies had spent years defending Mr. Trump’s continued presence on their platforms, only to change course days before the end of his presidency.
Why these companies’ chief executives — Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook — decided to act now is no mystery. They have been under pressure for years to hold Mr. Trump accountable, and that pressure intensified enormously this past week, as everyone from Michelle Obama to the companies’ own employees called for a permanent ban in the wake of Wednesday’s deadly Capitol riot.
These companies, corporate autocracies masquerading as mini-democracies, often portray their moderation decisions as the results of a kind of formulaic due process, as if “don’t incite an insurrectionist mob” had been in the community guidelines all along. But high-stakes calls like these typically come down to gut decisions made under extreme duress. In this case, Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg considered the evidence, consulted their teams, weighed the trade-offs and risks of inaction — including the threat of a worker revolt that could damage their ability to attract top talent — and decided that they’d seen enough.
Journalists and historians will spend years unpacking the improvisational nature of these bans, and scrutinizing why they arrived just as Mr. Trump was losing his power, and Democrats were poised to take control of Congress and the White House. The bans have also turned up the heat on a free-speech debate that has been simmering for years.
On Friday night, pro-Trump Republicans raged, claiming Twitter’s move was an example of Silicon Valley’s tyrannical speech controls. And while many liberals cheered Twitter’s decision as an overdue and appropriate step to prevent more violence, some also cringed at the thought of so much control resting in so few hands.
“We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now,” Kate Ruane, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a statement on Friday. “But it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”
Above all, Mr. Trump’s muzzling provides a clarifying lesson in where power resides in our digital society — not just in the precedent of law or the checks and balances of government, but in the ability to deny access to the platforms that shape our public discourse.
Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg’s names have never appeared on a ballot. But they have a kind of authority that no elected official on earth can claim. This power appears mostly in subtle and unspoken ways — like the eerily calm, hostage-like video Mr. Trump filmed on Thursday, hours after Twitter and Facebook threatened to delete his accounts. In the video, Mr. Trump conceded that he had lost the election and condemned the Capitol attack, two things he had stubbornly refused to do even as Congress talked of impeaching him a second time and his own Cabinet members discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
Legal and political concerns certainly pressured the president to adopt a more conciliatory stance. But there was another interpretation of his change of heart: Mr. Trump would rather lose his presidency than his posting privileges.
In some ways, Mr. Trump — who used to boast that the platforms “would never” ban him — would be correct to make his social media accounts a priority over his remaining days in office. A successful impeachment would be an embarrassing end to Mr. Trump’s political career. But losing his huge online following — 88 million followers on Twitter, and 35 million on Facebook — would deprive him of cultural influence long into the future. It takes away the privilege he seems to covet most: the ability to commandeer the world’s attention with a push of a button.
Mr. Trump is no ordinary inmate in Twitter jail. Unlike other de-platformed partisans, he has a huge right-wing media apparatus that will follow him wherever he goes, and legions of followers who will amplify what he says no matter where he says it. On Friday, his followers pledged to decamp to so-called “alt-platforms” like Gab and Parler, which have less stringent rules. But these apps are tiny by comparison and, because they are largely unmoderated, often amount to last-resort echo chambers for noxious extremists.
If none of the alt-platforms suffices, Mr. Trump may well start his own social network, one where he can post with abandon. And if all else fails, he can always call into Fox News.
But rebuilding a huge audience on a new platform is no simple thing, even for a former president, and these alt-platforms face their own legal and technical battles. Parler itself suffered a major blow on Saturday when Apple joined Google in blocking it from their app stores, citing the app’s lax moderation policies.
No matter where he ends up posting, it’s doubtful that Mr. Trump will ever have what he had in Facebook and Twitter — a frictionless soapbox, where he could joust with his enemies as well as bask in the adoration of his fans, and a direct line to every newsroom in the country.
In some ways, Mr. Trump’s social media dominance was an accident of history. In 2009, when he first joined Twitter, Mr. Trump was a reality TV star looking for attention, and Twitter was a fledgling social network that needed high-profile celebrities to attract growth.
It was a perfect match, and Mr. Trump soon began honing the freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness style that would become his signature. For years, he used the platform to weigh in on everything from wind turbines (ugly) to President Barack Obama’s birth certificate (fake) to Jon Stewart’s comedy (overrated). Mr. Trump’s filter-free musings turned out to be engagement gold for Twitter, which recommended his tweets to millions of new users through its algorithms.
Social media became an even more powerful asset for Mr. Trump when he turned to politics. And after he got elected president, thanks in large part to his dominance on Twitter and Facebook, he used his accounts in ways no world leader ever had: to announce major policies, bully foreign governments, whip up votes in Congress, hire and fire senior officials, and interact with a motley crew of racists and cranks.
In time, we learned that the version of President Trump we saw on our feeds was, in many ways, more real than the flesh-and-blood human who occupied the Oval Office. People who wanted to know what Mr. Trump actually thought about kneeling N.F.L. players or Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t watch him read a prepared speech or hold a news conference. They looked to @realDonaldTrump, the most honest representation of who he was.
The most predictable result of Mr. Trump’s dismissal from Twitter — and, most likely, a similar ban he’ll face from Facebook after Inauguration Day — is that it will become a rallying cry for conservatives who see themselves as victims of Silicon Valley censorship.
“We are living Orwell’s 1984,” the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., fumed on his (still operational, 6.5 million-follower) Twitter account. “Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech.”
No serious thinker believes that Twitter and Facebook, as private companies, are obligated to give any user a platform, just as no one doubts that a restaurant owner can boot an unruly diner for causing a scene. But there are legitimate questions about whether a small handful of unelected tech executives, accountable only to their boards and shareholders (and, in Mr. Zuckerberg’s case, to neither) should wield such enormous power. These actions also raise longer-term questions, such as whether the business models of social media companies are fundamentally compatible with a healthy democracy, or whether a generation of Twitter-addicted politicians can ever be untaught the lesson that racking up retweets is a surer path to power than governing responsibly.
Mr. Trump’s ban will have tangible effects on the spread of disinformation about the 2020 election, much of which originated on his accounts. It will also probably accelerate the splintering of the American internet along partisan lines, a process that was already underway, and intensify calls on the right for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social media companies from legal liability for their users’ posts.
n the short term, people worried about a slippery slope of censorship on Twitter and Facebook can take some comfort in the fact that Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg appear to hate playing the role of speech police, and avoid doing it whenever possible. For them, Mr. Trump’s case is unlike any other — a celebrity who rode their platforms to the presidency, then used them to stage an attack on American democracy itself — and their decisions to ban him aren’t likely to set much of a precedent.
But that will be cold comfort to Mr. Trump, who now finds himself on the wrong side of the bright line these companies have drawn.
The president railed against Twitter's ban on Friday night, releasing a fiery statement through the White House press office that claimed, “We will not be SILENCED!”
But in the ways that matter most to him, he already had been.
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—World-Outlook, January 10, 2021
https://world-outlook.com/2021/01/10/example-post-2/
January 10, 2021—In a culminating step to a series of developments unprecedented in U.S. politics in more than a century, outgoing U.S. president Donald Trump and his supporters engaged in a riot aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election. While Congress certified the outcome of the November vote next day, on January 7, it is notable that more than 20 percent of members of the House and Senate, all Republicans, joined Trump’s challenge to his defeat at the polls, even after the rightist mob attack on the U.S. Capitol had been dispersed.
Trump’s dogged refusal to accept the results split the Republican Party as he insisted on his demand to hold on to political power and remain in the White House. The U.S. president and his supporters filed dozens of complaints and lawsuits to push unsubstantiated claims of a fraudulent vote. State government officials, often Republicans, state legislatures in the six “swing” states where Trump disputed the outcome of the popular vote, as well as lower federal courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court swiftly rejected these challenges. Despite such overwhelming institutional repudiation, Trump’s conspiratorial and outlandish claims of a “stolen election” still won backing from some 120 members of the House of Representatives and half-a-dozen U.S. senators, who in the end objected to certifying the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. They also energized radical rightist groups, which, with Trump’s prodding, staged violent protests in the U.S. Capitol January 6, storming the building and forcing a joint session of Congress, convened to certify the election results, to temporarily suspend proceedings. Earlier, a fringe among the U.S. president’s backers had even suggested he invoke martial law to remain in power.
Many politicians tried to brush aside as “un-American” the unsuccessful attempt to overturn the election results. They included former President George W. Bush, who said January 6, this is “how elections are disputed in a banana republic, not our democratic republic.” These events, however, indicate that a not insignificant minority of the privileged classes at least considered sidestepping the legislative and judicial branches of government and handing all important policy decisions to the executive, run by an individual with extraordinary powers. One who would not act as a servant of the institutions of capitalist democracy, but who would instead be anointed to “rescue the nation,” in order to finally “make America great again.”
The accurate political term for such a course is “Bonapartism.” It was also manifested in the campaign and significant vote for billionaire Ross Perot in the 1992 U.S. presidential elections albeit as a whisper then. While the challenge to the 2020 election results failed, the danger it represents to civil liberties and the working class is palpable and will not disappear. To the contrary, all indications point to Trump and his backers using these claims to campaign against the “illegitimate” administration of Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the coming months and years.
All this is unfolding in the middle of the global capitalist economic and social crisis we are now living through, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The history of the last century shows that such steep economic downturns start breeding radical attitudes ahead of triggering significant class battles. Before large numbers of workers become receptive to class-struggle proposals and open to political action independent of the capitalist class and its parties—the Democrats and Republicans—radical attitudes get a hearing in the middle class and among layers of workers. The working class in the United States does not yet think and act like a class. Much of the political initiative today comes from right-wing currents. Ultra-rightist groups take advantage of their foothold within the two-party system and other ruling-class institutions. They tap into the loss of confidence in the government and suspicions of the most prominent, established politicians. Conditions are ripe for rightist demagogy and conspiracy theories to gain a wide reach.
Republican Party rift
While Trump tried to keep a tight grip on the Republican Party and originally won support from 13 U.S. senators and some 140 House members, he faced considerable pushback against his effort to hold on to power, indicating that a large majority of the moneyed men and women and their political representatives opposed a Bonapartist takeover. The rift tore through the GOP and extended to big-business executives and owners of conservative media who had backed Trump.
“The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken,” majority speaker Mitch McConnell, said January 6 on the U.S. Senate floor, before the assault on the Capitol. “If we overrule them, it will damage our republic forever.”
“CEOs urge Congress to certify Biden’s Electoral College win,” said a January 4 headline in the Wall Street Journal. “Nearly 200 chief executives call on legislators to uphold ‘essential tenets of our democracy’ by enabling transition of power to president-elect.”
“Stop the insanity,” read the front-page banner headline in the December 27 New York Post. “Mr. President,” the Posteditors, ardent Trump supporters until recently, declared, “You lost the election.” They advised their man to accept defeat and “focus on Senate races in Georgia.”
Paul D. Ryan, former House speaker and 2012 GOP vice-presidential candidate, said in a January 3 statement: “Efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College and sow doubt about Joe Biden’s victory strike at the foundation of our Republic. It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans.”
The ten living former defense secretaries, Democrats and Republicans, signed an Op-Ed published in the January 3 Washington Post, warning: “As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, ‘there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.’ Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”
These former overseers of the U.S. military were citing a statement by the secretary of the Army and the Army chief of staff, disavowing any intention of participating in a military coup. Reporting on this in a December 20 article in The Atlantic magazine, David Frum wrote: “That’s a fine statement, in line with the long-standing traditions of the U.S. military. It’s alarming, though, that anybody thought it necessary at all. The next day, multiple media sources reported that President Donald Trump has been scheming about a possible coup in the Oval Office with his innermost team of advisers: Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani.”
On December 1, Flynn, a former Trump national security adviser, had shared a message on Twitter calling on the president to suspend the U.S. Constitution, “declare limited martial law,” have the “military oversee a national re-vote,” and “silence the destructive media.” While Flynn’s views may be backed by a right-wing fringe at the moment, the more recent statements by U.S. military officials and former defense secretaries underline the danger such rhetoric poses.
Storming of U.S. Capitol
In a calculated move, Trump even pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to try to stop Congress from certifying the November election. Pence refused. “I will keep the oath I made,” he stated, prompting his boss to slam him as a coward. “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done,” Trump tweeted January 6.
The same day, Trump addressed thousands of his supporters at a Washington D.C. rally to press his demands for overturning the election. “We will never concede,” he declared, urging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol. Thousands did. They surrounded the Capitol waving flags, signs, banners, as well as sticks and shields, and pressed the message of their leader, chanting “We want Trump!” While small numbers of police stood by or were ineffectual, hundreds stormed the building. Some broke windows, scaled fences, and brandished weapons. One protester was shot by the police in the melee and later died. Five others also died, three from medical complications and two policemen from injuries suffered during the scuffle. The rightist attack prompted officials to evacuate legislators and suspend the joint session of Congress, which at that time had started deliberations on certifying the November election. Most politicians, including Pence and other top Republicans, promptly condemned the assault and called on protesters to leave the area. The D.C. mayor declared a curfew that evening. Maryland state police, the D.C. National Guard, and federal agencies deployed armed forces around the U.S. Capitol.
In a pre-taped video message released to the media that afternoon, Trump offered a tepid reaction. He thanked protesters for their support, urging them to stay peaceful and go home, but his statement opened by reiterating his baseless claims of a “fraudulent vote.” Trump later seemed to condone the riot. “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long,” he tweeted that evening.
Trump had already heightened concerns about plans to bypass long-established capitalist electoral norms in a January 2 hour-long telephone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The transcript, made public by the Georgia Republican, reveals Trump’s demand that Raffensperger “find” 11,780 votes to overturn Biden’s win in that state. Trump also hinted that Raffensperger and the attorney for his office might find themselves charged with a “criminal offense” if they did not bend to Trump’s will. Georgia state officials declined the offer.
Mixed in with these threats were references to some of the wildest conspiracy theories Trump and some of his supporters have peddled, including the charge that 250,000 ballots or more were “dropped mysteriously into the rolls” in Georgia. Though unfounded, public opinion polls show that a large percentage of those who voted for Trump believe this claim and others.
The U.S. president had made his authoritarian tendencies clear leading up to Election Day. Trump repeatedly explained there could be only two outcomes. First, he would win. Second, he would be denied a second term through fraud and conspiracy. Echoing his assertion, he had been the victim of “the greatest witch-hunt in history” while in office, he claimed that could extend to the election outcome. He publicly insinuated there was no chance he wouldn’t be the choice of the majority.
These methods—conspiracy theories, the “big lie,” the leader allegedly under unfair attack from special interests—are among the stock-in-trade of Bonapartist demagogues who assert their word must be final in all disputes.
What is Bonapartism?
More than 50-years-ago Marxist scholar and working-class leader George Novack explained the essential meaning of Bonapartism. In an essay titled, “Bonapartism, Military Dictatorship and Fascism,” which appears in his book Democracy and Revolution, Novack said, “Parliamentary government…becomes a liability to big capital when the middle classes are radicalized, the workers take the offensive and the country seems to be slipping out of its control.”
He continued, “when social tensions tighten to the breaking point, parliament is less and less able either to settle the disputes at the top or act as a buffer between the power of property and the wrath of the masses. General disappointment with its performance plunges bourgeois parliamentarism together with its parties into a period of acute crisis.”
Bonapartism, Novack explained, “carries to an extreme the concentration of power in the head of the state already discernible in the contemporary imperialist democracies. All important policy decisions are centralized in a single individual equipped with extraordinary emergency powers. He speaks and acts not as the servant of parliament… but in his own right as ‘the man of destiny’ who has been called upon to rescue the nation in its hour of mortal peril.”
Many of these factors exist today. The working class has not yet “taken the offensive,” as Novack put it, although Trump spoke for many in the ruling class when he attacked last summer’s mass actions, which included millions of workers, protesting cop brutality and racism after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. The other signs Novack described, however, are increasingly familiar. Trump’s desire to maintain and expand his individual power is no secret to any observer.
Moreover, Trump’s preference for the strong-arm role has been apparent since before he won the White House in 2016. It was expressed most clearly when Trump told that year’s GOP national convention—and the country—“I alone can fix it,” referring to the nationwide political, economic and social crises.
He alone, he claimed, would “drain the swamp” that many working people agree exists in Washington D.C. He alone could “Make America Great Again.”
There are other examples of Trump’s strong-arm tactics and his unlawful ambitions during his four years in office. They include his use of special federal agents—some operating with no identifying insignia—against cop brutality protests in Portland, Oregon, and the threat to use them elsewhere, particularly in what he called “anarchist cities,” including New York and Seattle, last year. Repeatedly, Trump suggested he could serve more than the two presidential terms allowed by the U.S. constitution.
Trump administration was not Bonapartist regime, but that danger is now clear
Despite the rhetoric, however, the overall record of the Trump administration shows it was not a Bonapartist, nor, even less, a fascist regime, as many on the U.S. left claim.
Trump did use executive orders but not in a way qualitatively different than his predecessors.
His boasting that he would clean house in D.C. was simply demagogy. The swamp of lobbyists and special interests was never “drained”—nor even touched—during Trump’s four years in the White House. His cabinet and other appointments included dozens of the same types who usually fill these posts serving both major capitalist parties. Examples include the billionaire Betsy DeVos who ran the Department of Education and Wilbur Ross Jr., the Commerce Secretary, previously named by Bloomberg Markets as one of the 50 most influential people in global finance and once an adviser to then-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Not to mention Giuliani himself.
Generally speaking, Trump did not try to openly undermine democratic institutions until last November. This changed in the aftermath of his defeat at the polls, as he openly bullied many state officials to revise the already certified vote tallies to help him stay in power, and called for street actions with the same goal. The scene at the U.S. Capitol January 6 shocked the U.S. and the world.
In today’s depression conditions and acute social crises, revealed more clearly by capitalism’s catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the danger has grown that the resolutely reactionary forces within the ruling class may “conspire to get out of their bind by shunting parliament aside and going over to a more exclusive rule,” as Novack put it. Steps can be taken along this course prior to actually shutting down the U.S. Congress, as the January 6 events suggest.
As post-election events demonstrate, while Biden won the election, the political initiative today remains in the hands of the right wing. This is not unexpected. The deepening capitalist crisis has resulted in a growth of radical attitudes but has not yet led to massive working-class struggles. Working people do not yet have a political voice on any mass scale independent of the capitalists and their parties that can lead workers and other exploited producers to think and act on the understanding that our class interests are counterposed to those of the privileged rulers.
At the same time, rightist forces who always maintain a foothold in the Republican and Democratic parties, take the lead in shaping attitudes in a heterogeneous popular mass, including among those in the middle classes and layers of workers and farmers looking for radical solutions. Many of their “theories,” like the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against Trump, may sound irrational to most people. But they do get a hearing because millions are trying to find answers to the irrationality of capitalism.
Incumbent presidents who have lost a bid for reelection are generally viewed as “lame ducks” between election and inauguration days. Trump made plain he would play no such role. While his wild claims of a “stolen election” were initially dismissed, he remained undeterred, and he won widespread support from Republicans in Congress as well as among the 74-million who voted for him.
Trump pushed his fantastic claims, disregarding facts, or his own past declarations, despite Biden’s clear win—306 to 232—in the Electoral College, not to mention Biden’s 81-million national vote tally, outpolling Trump by some seven million votes. In 2016, when Trump himself won the Electoral College by a similar count—304 to 227—he claimed it was a “landslide,” despite his loss in the popular vote that year to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Continuity with Ross Perot
Bonapartism reared its ugly head in U.S. politics during the 1992 presidential election campaign in the form of Ross Perot—a super wealthy businessman—who ran the most successful third-party campaign in recent U.S. history. Decrying the policies and politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties, he declared to all those fed up with the U.S. economic, social and political conditions at that time, “I’m Ross, you’re the boss.”
Perot exceeded predictions of all pre-election pollsters by winning 19 percent of the vote against Bill Clinton, the Democrat who won, and George H.W. Bush, the incumbent Republican who lost. Perot lied through his teeth, pushed conspiracy fantasies, and explained his admiration for the Navy Seals and other special forces of the U.S. military, while refusing protection from the Secret Service, which he said he did not trust.
Perot faded from the national scene but echoes of his appeal appeared later in the 1990s when Jesse Ventura—a well-known professional wrestler—again surprised many by winning the race for governor in Minnesota. Though more successful in attaining office than Perot, Ventura too faded from the scene.
These developments suggested the beginning of a crisis in the capitalist two-party system, which has long exercised a stranglehold on U.S. electoral politics. The propertied classes have used the Democratic and Republican parties to absorb all dissent, to conciliate the lower classes, and to deny the working class a chance for an independent political voice. The possibility of its breakup, revealed in the 1992 elections, corresponded to the inability of both parties to offer anything other than escalating assaults on working people beginning in the 1970s, with the end of the post-World War II boom. It was deepened by administrations run by both parties in the subsequent 40-years.
Since the developments recounted above, the working class and our main organizations, the trade unions, have remained on the defensive. The organized labor movement is as weak as it has ever been. With their mis-leadership tied to the Democratic Party, trade unions are for the most part docile and ineffective as working people face increasing misery.
Despite the tremors of the 1990s and beyond, however, the two-party setup has so far remained resilient enough to contain most dissatisfaction and discontent. Among liberals—including many workers who still define themselves that way—and what remains of “the left” in liberal and radical politics, the consensus to support Biden was virtually universal last year. Those who argue for independent working-class political action remain a tiny minority.
Among conservatives, and on the political right, there was no challenge to Trump’s re-election effort. His electoral loss notwithstanding, vote results showed that Trump’s support broadened and grew over 2016. This included winning slightly higher percentages among Latinos, and others of all skin colors, compared to four years ago. Biden, running as a Democrat, relied from the primaries through the general election, on overwhelming support among African-Americans. Yet even there, Trump seemed to have modestly gained strength.
Failure of bourgeois liberalism
This is a testimony to the decades-long failure of bourgeois liberalism as represented by the record of the Democratic Party. It is based on the experience of millions of workers—again of all skin colors—during the eight-year-long tenures of Bill Clinton in the 1990s and Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.
Wars and imperialist interventions in the Middle East and beyond to safeguard the profits of big business were also waged and defended under the Democrats.
Joblessness, under-employment (millions juggling two or more, poorly paid, part time jobs, forced to do so by manufacturing jobs being lost to automation and outsourcing abroad,) low wages (the federal minimum wage has been $7.25-per-hour for more than a decade,) inadequate housing (declining homeownership across the board since 2006, but with Black homeownership rates dropping to levels predating the 1968 Fair Housing Act,) a failed educational system, more deportations than at any time in U.S. history (with Democrats often showing the way,) and utterly inadequate medical care (only underlined by the very modest reforms of Obama’s “Affordable Care Act”) continued to afflict working people no matter who was in the White House.
And, as revolutionary leader Malcolm X often pointed out, Black people always catch more hell. A reality also faced by many Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and Native Americans, as well as Mexican and other immigrants from Latin America and the rest of the semicolonial world.
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he echoed some of Perot’s messages. If elected he would cut through the gridlock in Washington. In fact, he would do more; he would drive the “special interests” from power and restore America’s “greatness.” Trump added an edge to his demagogy, aimed initially at immigrants. “When Mexico sends its people,” he said, “they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you…. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump, however, took a different path than Perot who had no hope of winning the nomination of either capitalist party in 1992 and didn’t try to do so. From the beginning Perot ran as an “independent.” Neither he, nor Patrick Buchanan, an incipient fascist who ran against George H.W. Bush in the Republican primaries, could defeat an incumbent president inside the GOP at that time. The capitalist crisis, while already apparent, had not reached a stage where such options were seriously considered by the ruling elites.
More than 20 years later, Trump did the opposite. He ran as a candidate in the Republican primaries. Initially discounted or dismissed by most pundits—and other more established politicians—he registered primary victories that led one GOP “front runner” after another to drop out of the race as he ridiculed them. By the time of the GOP national convention his nomination was a settled question. That gathering became Trump’s convention and the GOP became Trump’s party. He brooked no challenges to his authority and was quick to attack publicly any GOP leader who did not fall into line.
Perot’s “I’m Ross, you’re the boss,” was essentially transformed into, “I’m Trump, I’m the boss.” The boss who will “Make America Great Again.”
Thus, a new and unusual situation developed. Trump was of the Republican Party, its undisputed leader. Yet he was also not entirely of the GOP.
Events following the 2020 election signal a new stage in U.S. politics, one with roots in the past as well as new perils.
What does the future hold?
The outcome of the election is now settled, but the danger of Bonapartism most definitely is not. Trump himself is unlikely to disappear from the political stage. Rather he has staked out a new position in it. While scheduled to leave the White House January 20, he continues to portray himself as the “man of destiny,” denied his “rightful place” by vast fraud and conspiracy that Congress, the courts, and even the Department of Justice in his own administration, refused to act against.
Once outside the White House and no longer in any way a part of official Washington, Trump is free to decry every branch of government. All can be fair targets as the “swamp,” the “fraud,” the “conspiracy,” and the “witch hunt” against the only viable savior of the nation. Whatever his precise future plans, Trump’s stance and forthcoming actions will likely exacerbate the crisis of both capitalist parties and the two-party system. Even if Trump’s appeal fades, other demagogues may step forward to try to play a similar role.
Despite the promises by Biden and his running mate Harris, the new administration is unlikely to stem the decline in the standard of living of working people and threats to civil liberties and political rights, even if some of their policies seek to ameliorate these conditions. The Democratic Party remains an ardent defender of the system responsible for the crisis.
This will inevitably offer grist to the mill of Trump and his supporters. His theatrics regarding the recent bi-partisan pandemic “relief” bill, which his Treasury Secretary helped negotiate but Trump waited to attack until after Congress approved it, suggest the form this can take. It underlines the unique status Trump has claimed for himself. He is still seen as a central leader of the Republican Party, despite his electoral defeat. But he also claims to stand above it, above “the swamp,” including the “vipers’ nest” in Congress, above the federal courts that let him down by refusing to expose and reverse “electoral fraud.” Fallout from the failed effort to stay in power despite his defeat at the polls is already affecting Trump’s standing in the GOP, as the post-January 6 resignations from his Cabinet and among his aides indicate, but it may also make him more popular among his most ardent supporters.
Trump’s popularity does not rest on his role as the top GOP boss. Rather it rests on what millions see as his independence from “the system.” That is an illusion, but one that is no less powerful for being false.
Trump, or someone like him using his playbook, thus positions himself as the future solution to the deepening crisis that neither of the two capitalist parties can solve. This is the classic stance of a would-be Bonapartist dictator as Novack explained so astutely: “The Bonapartist regime makes a big show of total independence from special interests. Its head invariably claims to be above the brawling party factions which have misruled the nation and led it to the brink of ruin, from which he has providentially snatched it in time. He parades as the anointed custodian of the eternal values, the true spirit of the people who have been victimized by selfish warring cliques or threatened by alien and subversive mischief makers.”
Bonapartist aspirations are not enough. To realize them depends on winning substantial ruling-class support Trump does not have. “Actually the ‘man of iron’ is mandated to defend the social interests of the magnates of capital by blunting the class conflicts which created the opportunity for his despotism,” as Novack said. “Though the big bourgeoisie may clench its teeth at the overhead cost of the Bonapartist experiment, it prefers to pay up lest worse befall it.”
So far there is no indication that a large and bold enough section of the ruling capitalists has decided to pay that price. However, there is now evidence that such a course has been considered. A final point Novack raised should also be noted: “The various forms of antidemocratic rule in the era of imperialism are not separated by impassable partitions. The lines of demarcation between them are often blurred and one can in the course of time grow over into another.”
Future events—not least among them, the shape and pace of any new resistance by the working class and its allies among the oppressed and exploited—will determine the outcome.
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An agency memo states that "if Congress attempts to remove POTUS via the 25th Amendment, a huge uprising will occur."
By Brett Wilkins, staff writer
Common Dreams, January 11, 2021
The FBI on Monday warned law enforcement agencies across the United States that armed protests by Boogaloo Boys and other far-right groups are possible at state Capitols throughout the nation starting later this week, and that an unnamed militant group is planning a "huge uprising" if President Donald Trump is removed from office for inciting last week's deadly mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
"The FBI received information about an identified armed group intending to travel to Washington, D.C. on 16 January," the FBI bulletin—which was reported by ABC News and other outlets—read. "They have warned that if Congress attempts to remove POTUS via the 25th Amendment, a huge uprising will occur."
According to ABC News, the FBI has also received information that an unnamed right-wing extremist group is calling for "storming" federal, state, and local courthouses and other government buildings in the event that Trump is removed from office before his term expires on January 20.
The group is also planning on invading government offices in every state, regardless of whether Trump or President-elect Joe Biden won it in the 2020 presidential election, the FBI memo said.
NBC News reports the memo includes information provided by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the DEA; Defense Department; Park Police; and the U.S. Marshals, among other agencies.
Another FBI memo from December 29, 2020 obtained by Yahoo News states that members of the Boogaloo movement planning protests scheduled for January 17 "indicated willingness to commit violence in support of their ideology, created contingency plans in the event violence occurred at the events, and identified law enforcement security measures and possible countermeasures."
The Boogaloo Boys are a far-right movement known for their violence, their Hawaiian shirts, and their desire to spark a second U.S. Civil War. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the group's name and movement refer to their desire for a insurrectionist revolt that would spark another Civil War. The first such war, started by secessionist Southern slave states, lasted from 1861 and 1865 and left some 620,000 Americans dead.
At least five people died during the January 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol that occurred while lawmakers were attempting to certify the Electoral College vote that officially affirmed Biden as the next president.
Trump, along with some of his most prominent supporters, as well as numerous Republican members of Congress, stand accused of inciting the rioters with with lies about a "stolen election" and exhortations to "take back our country" and engage in "trial by combat."
Common Dreams reported that House Democrats on Monday introduced articles of impeachment accusing Trump of "incitement of insurrection."
There are also growing calls for Republican inciters including Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) to resign over their roles in spurring the insurrectionists, and Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) on Monday introduced a resolution calling for the expulsion of her GOP colleagues who incited the mob attack.
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Rick Snyder, a Republican, was Michigan’s governor during the city’s water crisis, which left residents sickened.
By Kathleen Gray and Julie Bosman, Jan. 12, 2021
WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. — Rick Snyder, the former governor of Michigan, said he bears no criminal responsibility for the Flint water crisis, issuing a statement on Tuesday amid reports that charges connected to the crisis were imminent.
The Associated Press reported that Mr. Snyder, a Republican who has been out of office for two years, would be charged by the state attorney general’s office, along with several others, including his former health director, Nick Lyon.
“It is outrageous to think any criminal charges would be filed against Gov. Snyder,” Brian Lennon, a lawyer for Mr. Snyder, said in an email. “Any charges would be meritless. Coming from an administration that claims to be above partisan politics, it is deeply disappointing to see pure political motivation driving charging decisions.”
Mr. Snyder’s administration was in charge during Flint’s water crisis, which left thousands of the city’s residents sickened, angry and distrustful of the government.
Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, did not return phone calls.
The water crisis began in 2014, when officials switched Flint’s water source to the Flint River, a cost-saving measure that was intended to help a city in financial distress. But necessary corrosion controls were not added to the river water, causing lead from Flint’s aging pipes to leach into the drinking supply. Residents protested when water from their taps was brown and foul-smelling — frequently holding up jugs of discolored water in front of Flint’s City Hall — but local and state officials dismissed them.
Months later, doctors in Flint noticed alarmingly high lead levels in the blood of many residents, and at the same time, an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease sickened at least 87 people in the Flint region, killing nine of them. The outcry in Flint prompted the city to return the water to its previous source, Lake Huron, and begin an effort to replace the dangerous lead pipes — a project that is nearly complete.
Many of Flint’s 100,000 residents say that they have yet to trust the water again.
Charges had previously been filed in connection to the crisis, but in June of 2019, prosecutors stunned Flint by dropping all pending charges.
Fifteen state and local officials, including emergency managers who ran the city and a member of the governor’s cabinet, had been accused by state prosecutors of crimes as serious as involuntary manslaughter. Seven had already taken plea deals. Eight more, including most of the highest-ranking officials, were awaiting trial.
When the Michigan attorney general’s office, which had recently passed from Republican to Democratic hands, abruptly dropped the eight remaining cases, prosecutors left open the possibility of recharging some of those same people, and perhaps others, too. Mr. Snyder had not been charged in the earlier case, though members of his administration were.
Mr. Snyder, a former businessman, ran for the governor’s office a decade ago promising fiscal responsibility and a data-driven approach to the job.
Mr. Snyder left the governor’s office in 2019, prevented by term limits from seeking a third term.
Just last week, Mr. Snyder and Ms. Whitmer, in a rare gesture of bipartisanship, issued a joint statement condemning the violence in Washington.
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The U.S. decision was made in “the death throes of a failed and corrupt administration,” Cuba’s president said. For Cubans, the change in administrations in Washington can’t come soon enough.
By Ed Augustin and Kirk Semple, Jan. 12, 2021
HAVANA — When the Trump administration announced this week that it was designating Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, the reaction in Havana was swift and vociferous.
The Cuban government accused Washington of hypocrisy, and called the label an act of “political opportunism” by President Trump to obstruct relations between Cuba and the incoming administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Beyond indignation, though, Cubans are ready to move on, a sentiment underlined by their president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, who tweeted on Tuesday that the American decision had been made in “the death throes of a failed and corrupt administration.”
For the Cuban government and its people, the change in American presidential administrations can’t come soon enough.
Mr. Trump’s hard-line approach to the Cuban leadership has led to an array of restrictions on tourism, visas, remittances, investments and commerce, which have worsened an already poor economy. The pandemic has compounded the problems, in large part by bringing tourism, a major source of foreign currency, to a grinding halt.
Facing profound shortages of necessities like medicine and food, Cubans have been forced to stand in lines for hours in the hope of getting their hands on the meager stocks that exist. Supplies have gotten so thin that the government made it illegal for people to buy rice beyond their government-restricted monthly allotments.
Amid this hardship, many in Cuba are hoping that Mr. Biden will shift American policy in ways that might ease the economic duress. The president-elect has said little publicly about his policy goals for Cuba, though during the campaign he attacked Mr. Trump’s approach to Havana, saying, “Cuba is no closer to freedom and democracy today than it was four years ago.”
And Mr. Biden’s advisers have allowed that a normalization of relations with Cuba — essentially a return to the Obama-era détente — was the best strategy for effecting positive change.
Senior foreign policy personnel on the Biden transition team — including Antony Blinken, Mr. Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, and Alejandro Mayorkas, Mr. Biden’s nominee for Homeland Security secretary — were involved in the negotiations with Cuba during Mr. Obama’s second term.
“Biden’s team is not just parachuting in with no prior experience,” said Rafael Hernández, a political scientist and the chief editor of Temas, Cuba’s leading social sciences magazine. “They can pick up on the consensus they created during 2015-2016.”
And that’s the hope of many in Cuba.
“Biden means: hope that the worst is over,” said Hal Klepak, professor emeritus of history and strategy at the Royal Military College of Canada, who lives part time in Havana. “He means: the possibility of a renewed Obama-style opening. He means: listening to the C.I.A., the Pentagon and Homeland Security on the value of Cuba as a friend and collaborator and not an enemy.”
The decision to return Cuba to the list of states accused of sponsoring terrorism — a designation that last applied for more than three decades, until President Obama lifted it in 2015 — capped a relentless effort by the Trump administration to impose economic and diplomatic restrictions on the island.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others “worked with focus on repealing anything that could be seen as a benefit to the Cuba government,” said Ted A. Henken, associate professor of sociology at Baruch College in New York.
Though Mr. Trump’s company had been looking into investing in Cuba shortly before he took office, as president he has hit the Communist-ruled island with the harshest sanctions in more than a half-century. American cruise ships were prohibited from docking on the island, remittances from the United States were banned and tankers carrying oil from Venezuela were prevented from arriving with their cargo.
“The only thing left is diplomatic relations,” Mr. Henken said. “We still do officially have diplomatic relations with Cuba, even though they are on ice in actual practice.”
These efforts by the Trump administration to reverse the Obama initiatives have set back the development of the private sector in Cuba and short-circuited efforts by American businesses that had tried to build relations based on the Obama détente, he said.
Amid the restrictions, streets in Havana’s colonial quarter that were once flush with tourists saw a sharp drop in traffic, dropping still further during the pandemic. Fuel shortages have led to occasional blackouts and have worsened transportation. A drop in hard currency for imports meant, in some places, empty pharmacy shelves.
But the abysmal economy has apparently not undermined the leadership of Mr. Díaz-Canel, a Communist Party loyalist who became president in 2018 and whose government has continued to suppress political dissent.
Mr. Díaz-Canel, a low-key figure handpicked by his predecessor, Raúl Castro, has emphasized continuity from the Castro era but has also plowed ahead with economic reforms.
On Jan. 1, he unified the nation’s dual currency system to make the island’s labyrinthine economy more transparent and easier to navigate for foreign investors. Last year, his administration allowed the private sector to import and export directly, a move analysts described as a pragmatic response to the economic crisis.
Mr. Díaz-Canel has been mostly silent, at least publicly, on the potential for a thaw after Mr. Biden takes office. But on Nov. 8, he acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory with a suggestion of hope, writing on Twitter: “We recognize that the US people have chosen a new direction in the presidential elections. We believe in the possibility of having a constructive bilateral relation while respecting our differences.”
Should Mr. Biden move toward normalizing relations with Cuba, the Díaz-Canel administration will demand the removal of the terrorism designation as a condition, analysts said.
When Mr. Obama announced during his second term that he would normalize relations with Havana, the Cuban government was adamant about being removed from the list.
“The reason this is so sensitive to the Cubans is that they’ve been subjected to literally hundreds of terrorism attacks,” most of which were launched by Cuban exiles based in the United States and trained and organized by the C.I.A., said William LeoGrande, professor of government at American University in Washington.
So Cubans, he said, “take great offense at being labeled as supporters of terrorists.”
In reinstating Cuba to the terrorism list, Mr. Pompeo cited Cuba’s hosting of 10 Colombian rebel leaders, along with a handful of American fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the 1970s, and Cuba’s support for the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.
As the Cuban government has railed on social media and in the Cuban media against the terrorism designation, some Cubans have processed the news with a weary frustration.
“The U.S. is doing this to make things here explode,” said Liber Salvat, 35, a carpenter in downtown Havana who has been out of work and unable to get his hands on lumber since the onset of the pandemic.