Shut Down Adelanto Coalition puts ICE on Trial! Sat March 28th, 12:00 pm
There will be testimony from impacted folks, expert testimony, and more.
More information to follow about who is scheduled to speak, the judges, and the length of the program.Please save the date + RSVP for the virtual People’s Tribunal at 12pm on Sunday March 28th here!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeP69t5zwdkgnK-kNOhemVGcHW6poO4B6x5Pquyhpn92yYuow/viewform
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Bessemer, Alabama Amazon Solidarity Virtual Week of
Many thanks to all who've signed the petition and made calls to Amazon and Morgan Lewis to tell them to stop union busting and express solidarity with the BAmazon Union. Momentum behind the workers in Bessemer continues to build, as U.S. President Biden issued a statement supporting the workers' right to organize. This is a victory for the movement, given Biden's initial reluctance to say anything on what's happening in Bessemer, with many workers and activists pressuring him to go on record. The Virtual Week of Action to show solidarity with the historic struggle being waged by the majority Black workers in Bessemer, Alabama to win the first U.S. union at Amazon continues with a tweet storm today and a solidarity selfie day on Thursday. Wednesday, March 3 - Tweetstorm: No Union Busting! Solidarity with BAmazon Union!Tweet at Amazon, Morgan Lewis, and their executives to let them know: the whole world is watching and is in solidarity with the workers fighting for their union in Bessemer! Check out this page on the website for a list of handles to send your messages of solidarity and condemnation of their union busting, and some sample tweets to use and inspire your own messages as well. 
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Bessemer Amazon Workers: Ignites National
Movement to Organize Labor in the South
The Feb 20, National Day of Action in solidarity with the Bessemer, Alabama Amazon workers, was a national call to action to support organizing the South. Thanks to the many who organized and participated in solidarity actions.
The Bessemer workers launched their campaign at a time of increasing repressive government and the rise of a racist and divisive social movement that threatened to turn back the clock on basic democratic rights. Like the 1955, Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott during a similar repressive and divisive period, the Bessemer Amazon workers led by the 80-percent Black and women majority and the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), stepped forward.
Being the largest transnational corporation in the US, and a major part of the US and global economic supply-chain, Amazon corporate elites could not conceive of Amazon workers in the deep South, being a catalyst for igniting a national solidarity campaign.
Solidarity actions at Amazon sites were held in more than 50 cities, with 23 being in the South. The South is a region where US corporations and state governments have enacted the largest concentration of anti-labor laws and social policies designed to prevent unionization, keep wages low and working people divided. This has in turn helped to undermined the strength of the US national labor movement.
The Southern Workers Assembly (SWA), made the call for the National Day of Action, not as a one-time event. It is part of a larger strategy that requires the involvement of local and national labor unions, their rank-n-file, community organizations and social movements. It will take a national and international movement to organize transnational corporations in the South.
The SWA sees the national solidarity actions taking the next step to form local worker assemblies that unite rank-n-file workers, local unions and community organizations into a national network to expand organizing at Amazon locations and to support organizing labor in the South. The SWA will be reaching out to the 23 solidarity actions held in the South, to discuss developing an infrastructure of worker assemblies with rank-n-file organizers at Amazon and other major industries and sectors throughout the South.
With less than a month left before the union vote count of the Bessemer Amazon workers, the continuous solidarity actions in the form of weekly leafleting and developing and follow-up on Amazon worker contacts are important. Videos, photos and reports of weekly actions can be sent to the SWA at southernworker.org or at info@southernworker.org for posting on the SWA website.
The SWA call for the Feb 20 National Day of Action for the Bessemer Amazon workers union campaign, has prompted the formation of other solidarity committees and actions to help to spread the word far and wide. The work of the SWA will be building worker assemblies, and training rank-n-file organizers/cadres as an infrastructure for organizing a radical labor movement in the South. Whatever corporate schemes Amazon tries to use to discredit or defeat the union vote, Amazon workers must maintain organization to continue to involve workers in a collective struggle for changes.
Victory to the Bessemer Amazon Workers!
Read + share this statement online here
Support the Southern Workers Assembly - make a donation here:
https://www.patreon.com/SouthernWorkers
Copyright © 2021 Southern Workers Assembly, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Southern Workers Assembly
PO Box 934
Rocky Mount, NC 27802
Add us to your address book
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Rally to Free Malik and Demand Geo Group Out of California!
From: No Justice Under Capitalism <nojusticeundercapitalism@gmail.com>
Date: March 4, 2021 at 6:37:56 PM PST
To: "'Vickie Johnson' via No Justice Under Capitalism (NJUC)" <no-justice-under-capitalism@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [NJUC Updates] ACTION ALERT : Rally to Free Malik and Demand Geo Group Out of California!
Hi Family,SF Bay View Editor Malik Washington continues to face persecution by the $2.27B for-profit prison multinational, Geo Group, who profit off of caging people at 111 Taylor St. and many other re-entry facilities, private jails, and ICE Detention Centers across California. Malik was severely retaliated against for releasing a public memo documenting the preventable coronavirus outbreak at his halfway house. In response, the facility extended his sentence at 111 Taylor, stole his phone and put a gag order on him on what is the most egregious attack on journalism and Malik's constitutional right to freedom of speech. Malik sued them for violating his rights and now they are threatening to send him back to jail.This Sunday, March 7, join us from 12-2pm at 111 Taylor Street as we DEMAND:1) Malik's freedom2) California cuts all contracts with for-profit prison corporations3) An end to the attack on Black Liberation Journalism! For silencing Malik's voice is silencing the voice of the SF Bay View!***Did you know the SF Bay View distributes 20,000 newspapers per month within the U.S. Prison System and for FREE within Bay Area Black neighborhoods? It is crucial to keep the newspaper alive at a time when Black voices, and most especially Black incarcerated voices, continue to be silenced!Want to be a part of the change? Here's how you can help:1) Join us at the rally this Sunday. More information here.2) Blast the rally invite and flyer (attached) to your networks and all over social media3) Visit https://linktr.ee/freemalik to stay plugged in and contribute to Malik's legal fees4) Make sure to pack the (Zoom) court in support of Malik on Wed, March 10th at 9:30am.We got this, Community! See you all soon and thanks for your continued dedication to dismantling the carceral state!
#NewsomLetThemGo
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Mumia Abu-Jamal, Now in His 40th Year as an Incarcerated
Prisoner, Has Covid-19
BY DAVE LINDORFF, MARCH 1, 2021
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/01/mumia-abu-jamal-now-in-his-40th-year-as-an-incarcerated-prisoner-has-covid-19/
Internationally known US political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has reported to friends and family on the outside that he has contracted Covid-19 in the Pennsylvania prison where he is incarcerated, and says he is having difficulty breathing. His life is in immediate danger and he is in urgent need of hospital care.
This latest outrage was sadly predictable. Prisons across the US have for years been allowing serious illness to serve as a form of “silent execution” of prisoners, many of them certainly innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. Many prisoners in the system, guilty or not, are serving unfairly punitive terms that keep them confined into an old age meaning they are particularly vulnerable to potentially fatal illnesses, whether that is flu, cancer, hepatitis, pneumonia or now Covid-19.
Noted journalist and political activist Abu-Jamal, now 66 years old and entering his 40th year in prison, is serving a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole following his 1982 conviction of murder of a white police officer.
As I have written in my book on his case, Killing Time, his conviction followed a trial that featured coached and lying prosecution witnesses (including police officers), prosecutorial misconduct, withheld exculpatory evidence, racial bias in jury selection and a racist pro-prosecution judge overheard saying at the start of the trial that he would “help fry the nigger.” His appeal process was just as badly corrupted. Significantly, it was fatally tainted by the refusal of a former Philadelphia DA, Ron Castille, who during his tenure oversaw the legal effort to defeat Mumia’s appeals, to recuse himself later when, as a state supreme court justice he ruled on those same appeals he had overseen.
The entire legal process in Abu-Jamal’s case has been an grotesque atrocity and an epic scandal.
Already suffering from cirrhosis of the liver because, like virtually all prisoners in American jails, Mumia was, until a federal court ordered it, denied timely access to medication known to be 95% effective in treating the Hepatitis C virus endemic in US prisons. This was done by prison officials who were well aware that the disease, if left untreated, usually leads predictably to cirrhosis, then to liver cancer and eventually to death. In Mumia’s case, legal challenges by state attorneys for the prison system intentionally delayed that court order until he his disease had already advanced to cirrhosis of his liver.
Now Mumia has predictably caught Covid-19. I say predictably again because US prisons, overcrowded and impossible to maintain safe separation in, are known to be breeding grounds for epidemic disease, and yet have not been declared priority locations for early access to the vaccines that protect against the spread of this deadly virus that has already killed half a million Americans.
This denial of vaccination to a captive population of 2.3 million people is nothing short of a crime against humanity. It is a crime made all the more outrageous because, thanks to the excessive sentences so common in this vindictive, racist, classist and deliberately cruel society, many US prison inmates are old. The Bureau of Prisons reports that 20% of its prisoners, for example, are over 50. State prisons may be even worse, with many of them routinely sentencing felons to as much as 40 years, or, in case of rapes and murders, life without parole. Compare that to most civilized nations which limit sentences to 10-12 years even for the most serious of crimes.
Given the current pandemic medical crisis facing the US and the world, the US and all 50 states should immediately order the release of all older prisoners over the age of 50 unless a solid case can be made in individual instances that some older prisoner poses a grave risk of committing a violent act if released.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is not such a prisoner, having been a non-violent model prisoner for his entire 39 years of incarceration.
Free Mumia and all older inmates in Pennsylvania’s prisons immediately!
Virtual rally for Mumia’s release set for March 6
Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
Call the Superintendent of Mumia's Prison and demand he be taken to the hospital for treatment for COVID-19. It is not okay that they merely test him (they had not asof Fri. night), the results will take days to come back and he is experiencing chest pains & breathing problems now--and COVID requires quick medical care to avoid death.
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Pass COVID Protection and Debt Relief
Stop the Eviction Cliff!
Forgive Rent and Mortgage Debt!
Millions of Californians have been prevented from working and will not have the income to pay back rent or mortgage debts owed from this pandemic. For renters, on Feb 1st, landlords will be able to start evicting and a month later, they will be able to sue for unpaid rent. Urge your legislator and Gov Newsom to stop all evictions and forgive COVID debts!
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rock our state, with over 500 people dying from this terrible disease every day. The pandemic is not only ravaging the health of poor, black and brown communities the hardest - it is also disrupting our ability to make ends meet and stay in our homes. Shockingly, homelessness is set to double in California by 2023 due the economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19. [1]
Housing is healthcare: Without shelter, our very lives are on the line. Until enough of us have been vaccinated, our best weapon against this virus will remain our ability to stay at home.
Will you join me by urging your state senator, assembly member and Governor Gavin Newsom to pass both prevent evictions AND forgive rent debt?
This click-to-call tool makes it simple and easy.
https://www.acceaction.org/stopevictioncliff?utm_campaign=ab_15_16&utm_medium=email&utm_source=acceaction
Renters and small landlords know that much more needs to be done to prevent this pandemic from becoming a catastrophic eviction crisis. So far, our elected officials at the state and local level have put together a patchwork of protections that have stopped a bad crisis from getting much worse. But many of these protections expire soon, putting millions of people in danger. We face a tidal wave of evictions unless we act before the end of January.
We can take action to keep families in their homes while guaranteeing relief for small landlords by supporting an extension of eviction protections (AB 15) and providing rent debt relief paired with assistance for struggling landlords (AB 16). Assembly Member David Chiu of San Francisco is leading the charge with these bills as vehicles to get the job done. Again, the needed elements are:
Improve and extend existing protections so that tenants who can’t pay the rent due to COVID-19 do not face eviction
Provide rent forgiveness to lay the groundwork for a just recovery
Help struggling small and non-profit landlords with financial support
Ten months since the country was plunged into its first lockdown, tenants still can’t pay their rent and debt is piling up. This is hurting tenants and small landlords alike. We need a holistic approach that protects Californians in the short-run while forgiving unsustainable debts over the long term. That’s why we’re joining the Housing Now! coalition and Tenants Together on a statewide phone zap to tell our elected leaders to act now.
Will you join me by urging your state senator, assembly member and Governor Gavin Newsom to pass both prevent evictions AND forgive rent debt?
Time is running out. California’s statewide protections will start expiring by the end of this month. Millions face eviction. We have to pass AB 15 before the end of January. And we will not solve the long-term repercussions on the economic health of our communities without passing AB 16.
ASK YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS TO SAY YES ON AN EVICTION MORATORIUM AND RENT DEBT FORGIVENESS -- AB 15 AND AB16!!!
Let’s do our part in turning the corner on this pandemic. Our fight now will help protect millions of people in California. And when we fight, we win!
In solidarity,
Sasha Graham
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-12/new-report-foresees-tens-of-thousands-losing-homes-by-2023
ACCE Action
http://www.acceaction.org/
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Tell the New U.S. Administration - End
Economic Sanctions in the Face of the Global
COVID-19 Pandemic
Take action and sign the petition - click here!
https://sanctionskill.org/petition/
To: President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and all Members of the U.S. Congress:
We write to you because we are deeply concerned about the impact of U.S. sanctions on many countries that are suffering the dire consequences of COVID-19.
The global COVID-19 pandemic and global economic crash challenge all humanity. Scientific and technological cooperation and global solidarity are desperate needs. Instead, the Trump Administration escalated economic warfare (“sanctions”) against many countries around the globe.
We ask you to begin a new era in U.S. relations with the world by lifting all U.S. economic sanctions.
U.S. economic sanctions impact one-third of the world’s population in 39 countries.
These sanctions block shipments and purchases of essential medicines, testing equipment, PPE, vaccines and even basic food. Sanctions also cause chronic shortages of basic necessities, economic dislocation, chaotic hyperinflation, artificial famines, disease, and poverty, leading to tens of thousands of deaths. It is always the poorest and the weakest – infants, children, the chronically ill and the elderly – who suffer the worst impact of sanctions.
Sanctions are illegal. They are a violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. They are a crime against humanity used, like military intervention, to topple popular governments and movements.
The United States uses its military and economic dominance to pressure governments, institutions and corporations to end all normal trade relations with targeted nations, lest they risk asset seizures and even military action.
The first step toward change must be an end to the U.S.’ policies of economic war. We urge you to end these illegal sanctions on all countries immediately and to reset the U.S.’ relations with the world.
Add your name - Click here to sign the petition:
https://sanctionskill.org/petition/
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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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In Maine, inmates are growing vegetables and making meals from scratch to replace the deadly diets they have long been served.
By Patricia Leigh Brown, March 2, 2021
Of the seemingly endless tally of injustices of mass incarceration, one of the worst humiliations gets little attention from outside: the food. This shadow issue — the 3,000 bologna sandwiches, mystery meats slathered on white bread, soy filler masquerading as chicken and other culinary indignities consumed during a prison sentence — permeates life behind bars and instills a nearly universal sense of disgust.
Prison food is high on refined carbohydrates, sodium and sugar and low on nutrients — diets the rest of us have been told to avoid. Like everything about prisons, it disproportionately affects people of color, and it has grown worse during the pandemic. With most states spending $3 or less per person a day for meals, penitentiaries have become hidden food deserts, paralleling the neighborhoods from which many inmates have come.
The “hidden punishment” of food is the subject of a comprehensive new report by the research and advocacy organization Impact Justice. “Food is a fundamental human rights issue,” said Alex Busansky, the organization’s president and founder. “It’s not just one bad meal or experience, but years and years and thousands and thousands of meals.”
At the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine, however, an organic farmer with dirt under his fingernails and reform on his mind is demonstrating a new path, making the prison a pioneer in a nascent farm-to-prison table movement. “It would be a whole lot easier to just go ahead and throw on some chicken patties,” said Mark McBrine, the facility’s food service manager, who comes from generations of farmers. “But by putting time into it and cooking from scratch, we can provide much healthier and better-quality meals that save money and benefit the well-being of residents and staff.”
This medium- and minimum-security prison has a 750-tree heirloom apple orchard and a three-acre vegetable farm. The inmates cultivate and harvest crops, learn to prepare healthful meals from scratch and bake virtually all the prison’s rolls, breads and muffins. For what they don’t grow, Mr. McBrine aggressively courts fellow farmers and other local sources, scoring significant “opportunity buys” — from surplus organic mushrooms to multigrain stone-milled flour.
Early in the pandemic, when local suppliers were overflowing with food for shuttered restaurants, Mr. McBrine snapped up 45 free-range turkeys at 59 cents a pound and prepared a full Thanksgiving-style dinner in March with all the trimmings, followed by his grandmother’s recipe for turkey potpies with biscuit toppings.
On a chilly autumn morning with frost on the clover, a few inmates harvested the last of the season’s 77,000 pounds of apples (the surplus goes to other prisons and food banks). Like prisoners everywhere, they had strong opinions about standard-issue fare. “Consider eating ground-up gym mat with a little bit of seasoning,” Alexander Roth, 34, said about a typical meal at a county jail.
Before Mr. McBrine took over six years ago, inmates at Mountain View would routinely chuck their food trays in the garbage. This is typical, according to the Impact Justice report. The organization’s survey of 250 former prisoners found that many did not receive enough food and contended with soured milk and spoiled meat.
Food quality, or lack thereof, has a direct impact on behavior, notes Jeff Morin, Mountain View’s warden. “This is not a healthy population due to some of the lifestyles they grew up in,” he observed. “If they don’t feel good, they’re not going to act good.”
The issue, though, goes way beyond fostering good behavior. Though the average American rarely spends time worrying over how incarcerated people are being treated, their physical, psychological and emotional health has a ripple effect on all of us, especially after they serve their time. If the goal of prison involves not only punishment but also rehabilitation and lowering recidivism, then sending a healthier person back into society is in everyone’s interest.
“Mark teaches them the science and health values behind what they’re doing,” Mr. Morin said. “So when they leave they have a knowledge base that they can utilize in the community.” Over the last five years, more than 25 of Mr. McBrine’s “graduates” have landed full-time work at a large commercial bakery.
In Maine, the enlightened approach comes from the top: Randall Liberty, the state’s corrections commissioner, is a certified master gardener and beekeeper. He is also a former inmate’s son and grew up in a trailer on public assistance and ate molasses and biscuits for dinner when money was tight.
When he was warden at Maine State Prison, Mr. Liberty instituted composting after learning, to his horror, that leftovers from the 3,000 meals served a day were being thrown away. The composting saved $100,000 annually and enriched the soil where a two-and-a-half-acre vegetable garden now flourishes. He also installed beehives “outside the wire” periphery that he initially tended himself (inmates now care for the hives throughout the system). Prisoners can become certified master gardeners or beekeepers through the University of Maine’s cooperative extension.
Initiatives like Maine’s, of course, are rare. As Impact Justice’s report makes clear, slashed prison budgets have resulted in fewer hot meals, smaller portions, poorly equipped and unsanitary kitchens and 20-minute-or-less meals in cacophonous and dehumanizing chow halls.
Arthur Robinson, 63, who was incarcerated for 40 years in California, considered the food a plus when he arrived in the 1970s, recalling a fresh half-chicken or menudo (a traditional Mexican soup made with cow stomach) for dinner. That changed when the “tough on crime” policies of the 1980s precipitated a sevenfold increase in the state’s prison population. “They got dietitians to say, ‘This is what a person needs to survive, right?’ They didn’t take into account feeding the people. So you were getting the bare minimum,” Mr. Robinson said.
Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, an advocacy network, performed a grim science experiment on one prison’s prepackaged lunches: watering the chemical-smelling bread to see if it would develop mold (it didn’t) and trying to get the cheese to melt (it wouldn’t).
The public health ramifications of a poor diet are profound: Incarcerated people suffer from higher rates of costly chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes. “Lifestyle changes are a significant tool for these conditions, and diet is a huge part,” noted Dr. Shira Shavit, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine and the executive director of the Transitions Clinic Network, a constellation of 44 health clinics for formerly incarcerated patients. In addition to a lack of daily fresh fruits and vegetables, Dr. Shavit pointed out that in prison, “people don’t learn needed skills about healthy eating because there are very few food choices.
“It’s a missed opportunity,” she continued. “It’s yet another example of how we don’t prepare people to come back to the community.”
Yet even beyond Maine, the culture is changing, albeit at glacial pace. At the Noble Correctional Institution in Ohio, for instance, the desire to foster positive family visits led officials to organize a cookout so that inmates and their families could grill and share a meal together. The prep, eating and cleanup “symbolize the effort involved in any healthy relationship,” said Tim Buchanan, the former warden.
And in Maryland, the nonprofit Farm to Prison Project is piloting a program with the Maryland Institute for Women to replace standard canned and frozen fruits and vegetables with fresh locally sourced produce.
Peter Allison, the executive director of Farm to Institution New England, a six-state network that helps to create markets for farmers and fishermen through institutional procurement, said the pandemic prompted a shift in thinking. Many schools and colleges, long regarded as steady sources of income, have closed temporarily. Correctional institutions, Mr. Allison noted, can potentially play a vital role as stable outlets for farmers, fishermen and other producers.
Improving the health of incarcerated people through more palatable and wholesome food will mean bringing together farmers, chefs, corrections officials and legislators as well as people who have lived behind bars. There is just one missing ingredient.
“It’s really a question of political will,” Mr. Allison said.
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A vote on whether to form a union at the e-commerce giant’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., has become a labor showdown, drawing the attention of N.F.L. players, and the White House.
By Michael Corkery and Karen Weise, March 2, 2021
Players from the National Football League were among the first to voice their support. Then came Stacey Abrams, the Democratic star who helped turn Georgia blue in the 2020 election. The actor Danny Glover traveled to Bessemer, Ala., for a news conference last week, where he invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s pro-union leanings in urging workers at Amazon’s warehouse there to organize. Tina Fey has weighed in, and so has Senator Bernie Sanders.
Then on Sunday, President Biden issued a resounding declaration of solidarity with the workers now voting on whether to form a union at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, without mentioning the company by name. Posted to his official Twitter account, his video was one of the most forceful statements in support of unionizing by an American president in recent memory.
“Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union,” Mr. Biden said.
A unionizing campaign that had deliberately stayed under the radar for months has in recent days blossomed into a star-studded showdown to influence the workers. On one side is the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and its many pro-labor allies in the worlds of politics, sports and Hollywood. On the other is one of the world’s dominant companies, an e-commerce behemoth that has warded off previous unionizing efforts at its U.S. facilities over its more than 25-year history.
The attention is turning this union vote into a referendum not just on working conditions at the Bessemer warehouse, which employs 5,800, but on the plight of low-wage employees and workers of color in particular. Many of the employees in the Alabama warehouse are Black, a fact that the union organizers have highlighted in their campaign seeking to link the vote to the struggle for civil rights in the South.
The retail workers union has a long history of organizing Black workers in the poultry and food production industries, helping them gain basic benefits like paid time off and safety protections and a means to economic security. The union is portraying its efforts in Bessemer as part of that legacy.
“This is an organizing campaign in the right-to-work South during the pandemic at one of the largest companies in the world,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School. “The significance of a union victory there really couldn’t be overstated.”
The warehouse workers began voting by mail on Feb. 8 and the ballots are due at the end of this month. A union can form if a majority of the votes cast favor such a move.
Amazon’s countercampaign, both inside the warehouse and on a national stage, has zeroed in on pure economics: that its starting wage is $15 an hour, plus benefits. That is far more than its competitors in Alabama, where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
“It’s important that employees understand the facts of joining a union,” Heather Knox, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We will provide education about that and the election process so they can make an informed decision. If the union vote passes, it will impact everyone at the site and it’s important associates understand what that means for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon.” The company, which went on a huge hiring spree last year as homebound customers sent its sales to a record $386 billion, recorded more than $22 billion in profit.
In Alabama, some workers are growing weary of the process. One employee recently posted on Facebook: “This union stuff getting on my nerves. Let it be March 30th already!!!”
The situation is getting testy, with union leaders accusing Amazon of a series of “union-busting” tactics.
The company has posted signs across the warehouse, next to hand sanitizing stations and even in bathroom stalls. It sends regular texts and emails, pointing out the problems with unions. It posts photos of workers in Bessemer on the internal company app saying how much they love Amazon.
At certain training sessions, company representatives have pointed out the cost of union dues. When some workers have asked pointed questions in the meetings, the Amazon representatives followed up with them at their work stations re-emphasizing the downsides of unions, employees and organizers say. The meetings stopped once the voting started, but the signs are still up, said Jennifer Bates, a pro-union worker in the warehouse.
In this charged atmosphere, even routine things have become suspect. The union has raised questions about the changing of the timing of a traffic light near the warehouse where labor organizers try to talk to the workers as they are stopped in their vehicles while leaving the facility.
Amazon did ask county officials in mid-December to change the light’s timing, though there is no evidence in the county records that the change was made to thwart the union. “Traffic for Amazon is backing up around shift change,” the public records stated as the reason the county altered the light.
Amazon regularly navigates traffic concerns around its facilities, and wasting unpaid time in congested parking lots is a frequent gripe of Amazon workers in Facebook groups.
But the retail workers’ union president, Stuart Appelbaum, questioned the timing of the request in Bessemer, coming as it did at the height of the organizing. “When the light was red we could answer questions and have a brief conversation with workers,” he said.
Last week, the union questioned an offer the company made to the Alabama warehouse workers to pay them at least $1,000 if they quit by late March. Mr. Appelbaum accused the company of trying to entice employees to leave before the vote ended.
“They are trying to remove the most likely union supporters from their work force by bribing them to leave and give up their vote,” he said in an interview.
But “The Offer,” as it’s known among employees, was the same that Amazon made to workers at all of its warehouses around the country. It is an annual program that lets the company reduce its head count after the peak holiday shopping season without layoffs. It has been in place since at least 2014, when Jeff Bezos wrote about it in a shareholder letter.
“Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit,” Mr. Bezos said at the time. “In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.”
Mr. Appelbaum was not swayed. He said he believed that Amazon had chosen to make the offer across all of its warehouses when it did in order to help eliminate possible “yes” votes in Bessemer.
President Biden stopped short of urging the Amazon workers to unionize, but his statement instantly raised the stakes of an already momentous campaign.
“Let me be really clear,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union. But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an employer to decide that, either. The choice to join a union is up to the workers. Full stop.”
He added, “Workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. This is vitally important — a vitally important choice.” And it is one, he said, that should be made without intimidation or threats.
Despite the union’s suspicions, it has not filed any formal complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, Mr. Appelbaum said. Typically, unions can raise objections to a company’s tactics before an election and the labor board can step in.
If a complaint were to be filed, the labor board could potentially determine that the election is invalid because of Amazon’s actions. But after working for months to build support inside and outside the Amazon warehouse, the last thing the union wants is for the labor board to intervene and rule that the election must be held again. The voting has already been taking place in Bessemer for nearly a month.
Mr. Sachs, of Harvard Law School, said that despite Mr. Biden’s admonishments of companies’ interfering in elections, the current labor law does allow Amazon to hold certain mandatory meetings with workers to discuss why they shouldn’t unionize and enables the company to post anti-union messages around the workplace.
“It is very helpful that the president is calling out these tactics, but what we need is a new labor law to stop companies from interfering,” he said.
It is rare for such a large union election to be held by mail. Over Amazon’s objections, the labor board required a mail-in vote after determining that federal election monitors would be at risk of contracting Covid-19 if they had to travel to Bessemer to oversee in-person voting.
By pushing back aggressively against the union, Amazon risks angering Democrats in Washington, many of whom are already calling for more antitrust scrutiny of big tech companies, whose businesses have grown even larger in the pandemic. Amazon has mounted a public campaign supporting legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, buying prominent ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.
In his video on Sunday, President Biden specifically mentioned how unions can help “Black and brown workers” and vulnerable workers struggling during the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic.
Ms. Bates, 48, one of the leaders of the union drive, started working at the Bessemer warehouse in May.
She said she felt insulted by some of Amazon’s anti-union efforts, particularly the company’s statements to the staff that they would be required to pay nearly $500 in union dues every year. Because Alabama is a right-to-work state, there is no such requirement that a worker in a unionized workplace pay dues.
“It angers me a little bit because I feel like they know the truth and they won’t tell the truth and are taking advantage because they know employees come from a community that is looked on as Black and low income,” said Ms. Bates, who is Black. “It felt really horrible that you would stand there and mislead people intentionally. Give them the facts and let them decide.”
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The gray wolf lost Endangered Species Act protections last year, prompting a recent hunt that killed at least 216 wolves — far exceeding a quota set by state wildlife officials.
By Maria Cramer, March 3, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/us/wisconsin-wolves-killings.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
The Trump administration announced last year that the gray wolf would no longer be protected under the Endangered Species Act. Last week, hunters in Wisconsin killed more than 200 wolves. Credit...Dan Rozak/Alamy
Hunters in Wisconsin killed more than 200 wolves last week, far exceeding the state’s limit as they scrambled to take advantage of Trump-era wildlife rules that they worry may be tightened by the Biden administration.
At least 216 wolves were killed in less than 60 hours, exceeding the state quota of 119 and prompting Wisconsin to end what was meant to be a one-week hunt four days early, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Environmentalists, who fought unsuccessfully in state court to stop the hunt, said the killings had occurred during breeding season, when gray wolves are especially vulnerable. They said the large number of wolves killed in such a short time underscored the need for President Biden to put the gray wolf back on the list of animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.
“These animals were killed using packs of dogs, snares and leg-hold traps,” Kitty Block, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said on Tuesday. “It was a race to kill these animals in the most cruel ways.”
The hunt, reported by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, follows the gray wolf’s January removal from the Endangered Species Act. In October, the Trump administration announced that the species, which had been all but exterminated in the lower 48 states by the mid-20th century, had rebounded enough that it no longer needed federal shielding.
The removal of the wolf from the list was one of many rollbacks of environmental regulations under the Trump administration, which last summer announced new rules that would make it easier to remove a species from the endangered list and weaken protections for threatened species.
The resurgence of wolves in certain parts of the country has been called a success story for conservationists. But as their numbers grew, ranchers have had to contend with wolves’ appetite for cattle and sheep. Conservationists counter that wolves keep deer, elk and other species in check and therefore help prevent more vegetation loss.
The last time wolves were hunted in Wisconsin was 2014, after President Barack Obama said the wolf could be removed from federal protection.
A federal judge later rejected the Obama administration’s efforts to keep the wolf off the list.
Wisconsin is the only state in the country that requires a yearly wolf-hunting season if the animal is not protected under the Endangered Species Act, according to Nicholas Arrivo, a lawyer for the Humane Society.
The Trump administration’s decision meant the state would have to hold one hunting season a year, which under Wisconsin law starts in early November and ends on Feb. 28.
Wisconsin wildlife officials had scheduled the start of the hunting season for this November, citing the need for time to develop a “science-based” harvest quota and work closely with the public and Native American tribes to create a plan.
But Hunter Nation, a hunters group led by Luke Hilgemann of Wisconsin, accused state officials of “intentionally delaying the wolf harvest to give radical anti-hunting groups time to block the delisting and stop a hunt altogether.”
The group filed a lawsuit on Feb. 2 in which it argued that under state law, the hunt should be scheduled immediately since the wolf was taken off the list on Jan. 4.
The lawsuit noted a letter from Republican state lawmakers dated Jan. 15 in which they called for a wolf hunt season that month.
In their lawsuit, hunters pointed to President Biden’s executive order to tackle climate change, which included a review of all existing regulations and policies enacted by federal agencies under the Trump administration.
“There is a substantial possibility that Wisconsinites’ time to hunt wolves is limited,” according to the lawsuit.
On Feb. 12, a Jefferson County circuit court judge ruled in favor of the hunters, ordering the state to start the season that month.
Before the hunt, state officials estimated there were about 1,200 gray wolves in the state.
Mr. Arrivo said it was possible that many of the wolves killed last week were pregnant or might have been mothers with new pups that were still dependent on them and might now die of starvation.
“I think the actual death toll is considerably higher because of the rippling effects through the wolf family structure,” Mr. Arrivo said.
Hunter Nation said the large number of wolves hunted in such a short period of time showed that the population had “significantly increased.”
The group said that in 2014, it took two months for hunters to kill about 100 wolves.
“This season it took just three days!” the organization said in a statement, describing the hunt as a success. “Clearly, the population of gray wolves has significantly increased during that time and the D.N.R. must take a serious look at their population models and counting methods.”
Richard M. Esenberg, a lawyer for Hunter Nation, said it was misleading for animal rights activists to claim that hunters had killed double the number of wolves allowed by the state.
The state had set a quota of 200 wolves, with 119 for hunters who applied for permits with the department and 81 set aside to the Ojibwe Tribes under their treaty rights.
“The notion that there was this wide divergence between the outcome of the hunt and the number of the wolves that could be hunted simply doesn’t bear up to analysis,” Mr. Esenberg said.
But the tribes consider wolves to be sacred and made a deliberate decision not to hunt them, said Dylan Jennings, a spokesman for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, which represents the tribes.
The tribes saw their allocation as a way to conserve a large number of the wolves — not to give hunters more animals to kill, he said.
The losses are “appalling,” Mr. Jennings said. “There are a lot of people upset about it.”
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Mexico’s president is supporting a candidate accused of rape. Women may need to give up on him.
By Viridiana Ríos, March 4, 2021
MEXICO CITY — President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is in the middle of a political storm. His party nominated Félix Salgado Macedonio, who has been accused by five women of rape and sexual harassment, as a candidate for governor of Guerrero State.
Among the allegations: A woman said that as a 17-year-old in 1998 she was raped by Mr. Salgado in his home. Another woman said she was drugged, beaten and raped by him in 2016. A third woman accused him of sexual harassment in 2007.
Protests were quick to follow. A majority of Mexicans believe that Mr. López Obrador should withdraw his support for Mr. Salgado’s candidacy. Even within the president’s own Morena party, more than 100 senators and deputies demanded the withdrawal of the nomination. People who have been staunch party loyalists have threatened to resign.
Until now, the Morena party, Mexico’s largest, had been unified in its support for its main leader and founder, Mr. López Obrador. Demonstrating unwavering loyalty to the president was a path to party positions and voter support. Now, female Morena members are openly questioning Mr. López Obrador’s leadership. The result may be the fracturing of the party, perhaps the most important political development in Mexico in a decade.
Still, Mr. López Obrador seems to have not taken notice of the storm brewing. He is standing by Mr. Salgado.
Moreover, even though his cabinet has more women in it than any one before it, Mr. López Obrador believes that feminism is the wrong battle to wage. He thinks the root of Mexico’s poverty and gender inequality is the result of a government that for decades has been corruptly committed to protecting a group of businessmen who amassed fortunes thanks to their proximity to power, and not the country’s ingrained misogyny.
By his logic the injustices women suffer will be resolved when corruption is eradicated. Championing feminism, he reasons, is the conservative party’s attempt to create a distraction while it brazenly loots Mexico.
I am a Mexican woman, and I agree with Mr. López Obrador on many points. Like him, I believe that predatory political and economic elites have enriched themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
But unlike Mr. López Obrador, I know that even if wealth is redistributed, the abuse and inequalities suffered by women will remain. Women should not tolerate this lie the president continues to espouse.
Nor should we tolerate Mr. Salgado’s candidacy. Over 40 percent of Mexican women have been victims of some form of sexual assault. The sexual harassment we endure will not be resolved through trickle-down economics, but through punishing abusers.
Poverty has also increased among women while it has decreased among men: 32 million women are poor — 10 percent more than the number of men. Women in white-collar jobs continue to earn less than men.
This is the result of a history that has been forged by greedy men, who have exclusively run the show. The results have been disastrous: Their decisions have led us to become a country where inequality is endemic and poverty has the face of a woman.
Our economy, shaped by men, is replete with privileges for them. It is built on the unpaid work of millions of women who take care of children and the elderly so that men can study or engage in paid work.
My great-grandmother did not attend school so that she could take care of her father. Nor did my grandmother, so that she could care for her siblings. And my mother went to school until the day that she had to take care of me. Women are the victims of a government and an economy devised by men so that they have the money and women help them obtain it.
When Mr. López Obrador was elected president in 2018, he pledged to wage war on social injustice. Many women, including myself, thought that this meant that he would fight for us, because if the poor should come first, as he declared in his campaign speeches, then women should be at the forefront of his agenda.
Since his election, he has failed to hear our message, showing his insensitivity to the feminist cause and to the most basic demands of women.
We must change our tactics and stop wasting our energy trying to convince Mr. López Obrador that our fight against sexual violence and for gender equality is legitimate and essential. Many leftist women and politicians from his Morena party are also wasting valuable time on this uphill battle.
We must turn our focus to organizing and championing the fight against all injustices — not just those Mr. López Obrador deems relevant. Insisting on the withdrawal of Mr. Salgado’s candidacy is not a question of conservatism or liberalism, of right or left. It is a matter of basic human decency. And if the president does not understand this, it is time to find new leaders.
We must channel our anger and frustration into a political organization that includes all parties and encourages them to include a solid and reality-based gender agenda. Denouncing men who have committed sexual abuse is only part of the objective. The ultimate goal must be to correct the failures in the systems that make our society, and the state, dependent on the unfair labor burdens shouldered by women.
It is not enough to have female leadership in order to win the battle for women. We must fight for the social, political and economic justice that we have been denied and we must share it with others.
Only then will we be able to expand opportunities for all Mexicans.
Viridiana Ríos (@Viri_Rios) is a political analyst. This essay was translated by Erin Goodman from the Spanish. A version of it appeared on March 1 on the Spanish-language site of The New York Times.
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Racism must be exorcised from culture, including, or maybe especially, from children’s culture.
By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist, March 3, 2021
As a child, I was led to believe that Blackness was inferior. And I was not alone. The Black society into which I was born was riddled with these beliefs.
It wasn’t something that most if any would articulate in that way, let alone knowingly propagate. Rather, it was in the air, in the culture. We had been trained in it, bathed in it, acculturated to hate ourselves.
It happened for children in the most inconspicuous of ways: It was relayed through toys and dolls, cartoons and children’s shows, fairy tales and children’s books.
At every turn, at every moment, I was being baptized in the narrative that everything white was right, good, noble and beautiful, and everything Black was the opposite.
The first book I ever bought was a children’s book about Job from the Bible. Job was the whitest of white men in the book and so was the white savior with white beard lounging on a cloud. Indeed, every image I saw of Christianity featured white people. My great-uncle had a picture of a stringy-haired, blue-eyed white Jesus hanging over his bed.
Some of the first cartoons I can remember included Pepé Le Pew, who normalized rape culture; Speedy Gonzales, whose friends helped popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans; and Mammy Two Shoes, a heavyset Black maid who spoke in a heavy accent.
Reruns were a fixture in the pre-cable days, so I watched children’s shows like Tarzan, about a half-naked white man in the middle of an African jungle who conquers and tames it and outwits the Black people there, who are all portrayed as primitive, if not savage. I watched the old “Our Gang” (“Little Rascals”) shorts in which the Buckwheat character summoned all the stereotypes of the pickaninny.
And of course, I watched westerns that regularly depicted Native Americans as aggressive, bloodthirsty savages against whom valiant white men were forced to fight.
As James Baldwin put it in a 1965 essay:
“In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”
But, as the Equal Justice Initiative points out:
“Throughout history, Native people have been subjected to more than 1500 wars, attacks, and raids authorized by the United States government. Under the guise of ‘expanding civilization,’ the drive to amass land and widen borders incited decades of racial genocide.”
In elementary school we celebrated Columbus Day by coloring pictures of a happy, smiling white man and his three boats, not knowing that Columbus was a brutal enslaver and slave trader and who wrote in 1500 of enslaved women and girls: “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls: those from nine to ten are now in demand.”
In fact, it is in the early years that we become conscious of race, and it is then that we can begin to assign value to it.
As the American Psychological Association pointed out last year, new research indicates “Adults in the United States believe children should be almost 5 years old before talking with them about race, even though some infants are aware of race and preschoolers may have already developed racist beliefs.”
I was a teenager before I could start to understand what had been done to me, that I had been taught to hate myself, and for me to start to reverse it. The most illuminating — and sad — realization came when I became aware of the doll tests in which very young children were presented with a white doll and a Black one and asked to describe each. Most of the children preferred the white dolls and described them positively.
About 30 years ago, in my own version of the experiment, I grabbed an old yearbook from a school I attended whose student body was roughly evenly split between white and Black students. I gave it to my nephew who was 4 or 5 years old and told him to point to the people he thought were pretty. Every face on which that little brown finger landed was white.
It underscored for me that the things that we present children with, believing them innocent, can be highly corrosive and racially vicious.
So, this week when the company that controls the Dr. Seuss books announced that they would no longer publish six of the books because of racist and insensitive imagery, saying “these books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” I cheered as some bemoaned another victim of so-called “cancel culture.”
Racism must be exorcised from culture, including, or maybe especially, from children’s culture. Teaching a child to hate or be ashamed of themselves is a sin against their innocence and a weight against their possibilities.
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Despite the danger, women have been at the forefront of the movement, rebuking the generals who ousted a female civilian leader.
By Hannah Beech, March 4, 2021
An undated photograph that Ms. Kyal Sin, whose English name was Angel, posted on Instagram in 2019.
Doctors at a hospital in Yangon, Myanmar, protested days after the military coup last month. Credit...The New York Times
Protesters in formal gowns in Yangon last month. Credit...The New York Times
Protesters in Yangon last month. Credit...The New York Times
Esther Ze Naw and Ma Ei Thinzar Maung leading a rally in Yangon on Feb. 6. Credit...The New York Times
Protesters in front of the United States Embassy in Yangon last month. Credit...The New York Times
Ma Kyal Sin loved taekwondo, spicy food and a good red lipstick. She adopted the English name Angel, and her father hugged her goodbye when she went out on the streets of Mandalay, in central Myanmar, to join the crowds peacefully protesting the recent seizure of power by the military.
The black T-shirt that Ms. Kyal Sin wore to the protest on Wednesday carried a simple message: “Everything will be OK.”
In the afternoon, Ms. Kyal Sin, 18, was shot in the head by the security forces, who killed at least 30 people nationwide in the single bloodiest day since the Feb. 1 coup, according to the United Nations.
“She is a hero for our country,” said Ma Cho Nwe Oo, one of Ms. Kyal Sin’s close friends, who has also taken part in the daily rallies that have electrified hundreds of cities across Myanmar. “By participating in the revolution, our generation of young women shows that we are no less brave than men.”
Despite the risks, women have stood at the forefront of Myanmar’s protest movement, sending a powerful rebuke to the generals who ousted a female civilian leader and reimposed a patriarchal order that has suppressed women for half a century.
By the hundreds of thousands, they have gathered for daily marches, representing striking unions of teachers, garment workers and medical workers — all sectors dominated by women. The youngest are often on the front lines, where the security forces appear to have singled them out. Two young women were shot in the head on Wednesday and another near the heart, three bullets ending their lives.
Earlier this week, military television networks announced that the security forces were instructed not to use live ammunition, and that in self-defense they would only shoot at the lower body.
“We might lose some heroes in this revolution,” said Ma Sandar, an assistant general secretary of the Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar, who has been taking part in the protests. “Our women’s blood is red.”
The violence on Wednesday, which brought the death toll since the coup to at least 54, reflected the brutality of a military accustomed to killing its most innocent people. At least three children have been gunned down over the past month, and the first death of the military’s post-coup crackdown was a 20-year-old woman shot in the head on Feb. 9.
In the weeks since the protests began, groups of female medical volunteers have patrolled the streets, tending to the wounded and dying. Women have added spine to a civil disobedience movement that is crippling the functioning of the state. And they have flouted gender stereotypes in a country where tradition holds that garments covering the lower half of the bodies of the two sexes should not be washed together, lest the female spirit act as a contaminant.
With defiant creativity, people have strung up clotheslines of women’s sarongs, called htamein, to protect protest zones, knowing that some men are loath to walk under them. Others have affixed images of Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief who orchestrated the coup, to the hanging htamein, an affront to his virility.
“Young women are now leading the protests because we have a maternal nature and we can’t let the next generation be destroyed,” said Dr. Yin Yin Hnoung, a 28-year-old medical doctor who has dodged bullets in Mandalay. “We don’t care about our lives. We care about our future generations.”
While the military’s inhumanity extends to many of the country’s roughly 55 million people, women have the most to lose from the generals’ resumption of full authority, after five years of sharing power with a civilian government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The Tatmadaw, as the military is known, is deeply conservative, opining in official communications about the importance of modest dress for proper ladies.
There are no women in the Tatmadaw’s senior ranks, and its soldiers have systematically committed gang rape against women from ethnic minorities, according to investigations by the United Nations. In the generals’ worldview, women are often considered weak and impure. Traditional religious hierarchies in this predominantly Buddhist nation also place women at the feet of men.
The prejudices of the military and the monastery are not necessarily shared by Myanmar’s broader society. Women are educated and integral to the economy, particularly in business, manufacturing and the civil service. Increasingly, women have found their political voice. In elections last November, about 20 percent of candidates for the National League for Democracy, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, were women.
The party won in a landslide, trouncing the military-linked and far more male-dominated Union Solidarity and Development Party. The Tatmadaw has dismissed the results as fraudulent.
As the military began devolving some power over the past decade, Myanmar experienced one of the most profound and rapid societal changes in the world. A country that was once forcibly bunkered by the generals, who first seized power in a 1962 coup, went on Facebook and discovered memes, emojis and global conversations about gender politics.
“Even though these are dark days and my heart breaks with all these images of bloodshed, I’m more optimistic because I see women on the street,” said Dr. Miemie Winn Byrd, a Burmese-American who served as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army and is now a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “In this contest, I will put money on the women. They are unarmed, but they are the true warriors.”
That passion has ignited across the country, despite Tatmadaw crackdowns in past decades that have killed hundreds of people.
“Women took the frontier position in the fight against dictatorship because we believe it is our cause,” said Ma Ei Thinzar Maung, a 27-year-old politician and former political prisoner who, along with another woman the same age, led the first anti-coup demonstration in Yangon five days after the putsch.
Both Ms. Ei Thinzar Maung and her fellow rally leader, Esther Ze Naw, protest by day and hide by night. About 1,500 people have been arrested since the coup, according to a local monitoring group.
The pair were politicized at a young age and spoke up for the rights of ethnic minorities at a time when most people in Myanmar were unwilling to acknowledge the military’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Rohingya Muslims. At least one-third of Myanmar’s population is made up of a constellation of ethnic minorities, some of which are in armed conflict with the military.
When they led their rally on Feb. 6, the two women marched in shirts associated with the Karen ethnic group, whose villages have been overrun by Tatmadaw troops in recent days. Ms. Esther Ze Naw is from another minority, the Kachin, and as a 17-year-old she spent time in camps for the tens of thousands of civilians who were uprooted by Tatmadaw offensives. Military jets roared overhead, raining artillery on women and children, she recalled.
“That was the time I committed myself to working toward abolishing the military junta,” she said. “Minorities know what it feels like, where discrimination leads. And as a woman, we are still considered as a second sex.”
“That must be one of the reasons why women activists seem more committed to rights issues,” she added.
While the National League for Democracy is led by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, its top ranks are dominated by men. And like the Tatmadaw, the party’s highest echelons have tended to be reserved for members of the country’s ethnic Bamar majority.
On the streets of Myanmar, even as the security forces continue to fire at unarmed protesters, the makeup of the movement has been far more diverse. There are Muslim students, Catholic nuns, Buddhist monks, drag queens and a legion of young women.
“Gen Z are a fearless generation,” said Honey Aung, whose younger sister, Kyawt Nandar Aung, was killed by a bullet to the head on Wednesday in the city of Monywa. “My sister joined the protests every day. She hated dictatorship.”
In a speech that ran in a state propaganda publication earlier this week, General Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief, sniffed at the impropriety of the protesters, with their “indecent clothes contrary to Myanmar culture.” His definition is commonly considered to include women wearing trousers.
Moments before she was shot dead, Ms. Kyal Sin, dressed in sneakers and torn jeans, rallied her fellow peaceful protesters.
As they staggered from the tear gas fired by security forces on Wednesday, Ms. Kyal Sin dispensed water to cleanse their eyes. “We are not going to run,” she yelled, in a video recorded by another protester. “Our people’s blood should not reach the ground.”
“She is the bravest girl I have ever seen in my life,” said Ko Lu Maw, who photographed some of the final images of Ms. Kyal Sin, in an alert, proud pose amid a crowd of prostrate protesters.
Under her T-shirt, Ms. Kyal Sin wore a star-shaped pendant because her name means “pure star” in Burmese.
“She would say, ‘if you see a star, remember, that’s me,’” said Ms. Cho Nwe Oo, her friend. “I will always remember her proudly.”
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Several times in recent years, migrants trying to cross between Djibouti and Yemen have been thrown into the sea.
By Richard Pérez-Peña and Abdi Latif Dahir, March 3, 2021
Migrants boarding a smugger’s boat bound for Yemen last year in Djibouti. Credit...Nariman El-Mofty/Associated Press
Smugglers threw 80 migrants into the sea between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula on Wednesday, and at least 20 of them are believed to have drowned, in the third incident of its kind in less than six months, United Nations migration officials said.
The smugglers had packed about 200 migrants, including children, onto a boat in Djibouti that was bound for Yemen, crossing the narrow mouth of the Red Sea, according to Yvonne Ndege, regional spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. agency.
About a half-hour after leaving shore, the smugglers began shouting that there were too many people on board, and threw dozens of them overboard, she said. At least five bodies had been pulled from the water by Wednesday night, she added, and survivors were being treated at an I.O.M. center in Djibouti.
No information was immediately available about the migrants, but every year, thousands of Africans cross the sea to war-torn Yemen, intending to make the dangerous journey through that country to one of the wealthy Gulf states, where they hope to find work — just as many others cross the Mediterranean Sea, hoping to reach Europe.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought an economic slowdown and new travel restrictions, significantly reducing the flow of migrants into the Arabian states. They have also been scapegoated in Yemen as carriers of the virus, making the trip more perilous.
Many migrants who lost their jobs in the Gulf in the past year have made the trip in reverse, and thousands have spent time in I.O.M. quarantine facilities in Djibouti.
Mohammed Abdiker, the Horn of Africa director of the U.N. agency, tweeted that in two instances in October and in the incident on Wednesday, dozens have died at the hands of smugglers who forced people overboard. The people were thrown into the sea on Wednesday off the coast of Obock, a small port town in Djibouti, he said.
In one case in 2017, at least 50 people drowned. Some migrants have reported being beaten with sticks and metal bars to force them off the boats. Other say that once at sea, smugglers have demanded more than the agreed-upon price, threatening to throw them overboard if they fail to pay.
“Prosecuting traffickers and smugglers who prey on the vulnerabilities of migrants must be a priority,” António Vitorino, director general of the I.O.M., wrote on Twitter Wednesday.
Djibouti is a tiny country, smaller in area than New Hampshire, with fewer than one million people, wedged between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea. The major city and capital, also called Djibouti, lies only about 80 miles from the Yemeni coast. In some places, the strait between the two countries narrows to less than 17 miles, making it a prime crossing location.
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A promising bill to ensure African-Americans’ civil rights was snuffed out by a Senate filibuster in 1891.
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, March 5, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opinion/filibuster-voting-rights.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
An African-American family in Southern Mississippi in 1895. Credit...Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
This is the story of how a bill to save the vote and preserve a semblance of democracy for millions of Americans died at the hands of an intransigent, reactionary minority in the Senate, which used the filibuster to do its dirty work.
In the summer of 1890, the state of Mississippi held its second constitutional convention of the post-Civil War era. The first, in 1868, was an attempt to make biracial democracy a reality. This second was meant to be the final nail in its coffin.
White elites, working within the Democratic Party, had already toppled the state’s Republican-led Reconstruction government in 1876. “The Mississippi Democrats had conducted a classical counterrevolutionary crusade,” the historian George C. Rable writes in “But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction.”
“While publicly professing peaceful intentions, Democrats selectively used armed intimidation to destroy the Republican Party in the counties by keeping Black voters away or forcing them to vote Democratic.”
Angry whites, Rable continues, “engaged in terrorist activities with seeming impunity.”
Seizing power is one thing, consolidating it is another. Endemic poverty in the state put both whites and Blacks at the mercy of planter-merchants who provided land and credit in exchange for a substantial share of the crop. An ongoing depression — as well as additional economic shocks, like the Panic of 1884 — pulled these farmers deep into debt as they borrowed money at high interest rates to make up for low prices.
To fight these conditions, farmers organized as the Greenback Party, which urged greater government involvement in the economy. White farmers and some Black voters challenged Democratic control of state government. Tens of thousands of white Mississippians would join the Farmers’ Alliance, founded to end the exploitative crop-lien system and inflate the currency for the sake of sharecroppers and other small farmers.
Black farmers, banned from the Farmers’ Alliance, formed their own organizations. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance, for example, claimed many thousands of members mostly in the fertile lands of the Mississippi Delta. “Organized to emphasize self-help and new and efficient farming methods, it quickly moved to boycotts, demanding higher wages and espousing some types of legal and social reform,” the historian Dorothy Overstreet Pratt writes in “Sowing the Wind: The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890.”
Agrarian revolt fomented by poor whites challenged elite control over state politics; agrarian rebellion fomented by Blacks threatened control over a large part of the labor supply. And the violence used to suppress Black voting and political activity brought unwanted attention from a federal government still in the hands of the Republican Party. A new state constitution would solve the problem.
The unwanted attention came in the form of a voting rights bill. In his first message to Congress, issued in December 1889, President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican and a veteran of the Civil War, called on Congress to stop the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South and to help “secure to all our people a free exercise of the right of suffrage.” Voter suppression had cost Harrison the popular vote in the 1888 election. Securing the voting rights of Black Americans would redound to his — and the Republican Party’s — benefit, although that was not his only concern.
“In many parts of our country where the colored population is large the people of that race are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political rights and of many of their civil rights,” Harrison wrote. “The wrong does not expend itself upon those whose votes are suppressed. Every constituency in the Union is wronged.”
Henry Cabot Lodge, a young Republican congressman from Massachusetts and the chairman of the House elections committee, took up the call. In June 1890, as Mississippi elites debated whether to hold a constitutional convention, Lodge introduced his federal elections bill. Rather than let Southern officials certify elections, Lodge would place that power in the hands of federal officials. The bill, he explained on the House floor, would make public “all the facts relating to elections, to protect the voters and to render easy the punishment of fraud.” He went on:
“There is absolutely nothing in this bill except provisions to secure the greatest amount of publicity in regard to elections and to protect the ballot-box by making sure the punishment of those who commit crimes against the suffrage.”
Echoing President Harrison, Lodge declared that:
‘The government which made the Black man a citizen is bound to protect him in his rights as a citizen of the United States, and it is a cowardly government if it does not do it! No people can afford to write anything into their Constitution and not sustain it. A failure to do what is right bring is own punishment to nations as to men.’
Southern Democrats were livid, calling Lodge’s proposal an unconstitutional “force bill.” In the Senate, John W. Daniel of Virginia charged that it would “strip the states” of their “ancient and confessed right to determine the qualifications of their voters” as well as “the prerogatives of a state to choose and the right of each House to judge of the election, the return, and qualification of its members.”
Back in Mississippi, news of the Lodge bill pushed white elites into action. “Let us take warning from republicans who are entrenching in power, in the hope of permanent control of the Federal government,” wrote one newspaper editor, according to Pratt’s account. Although there were still disputes over the exact shape of a new constitution, there was wide agreement on the need to suppress Black voters and, as one delegate put it, “secure to the state of Mississippi, white supremacy.”
The convention had several constraints. It could not run afoul of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which barred states from denying the right to vote on the basis of race. It also had to be careful not to disenfranchise too many white men, given the real risk of backlash. The solution was a set of overlapping rules, regulations and reforms that established white dominance and defused some class antagonisms (while exacerbating others).
The new Mississippi Constitution would impose a poll tax for voting and a literacy test — called the “Understanding Clause” — for registration. These would disenfranchise a significant number of white voters in the poorer, less developed regions of the state. To account for this, and to resolve disputes over apportionment, delegates created a new system based on voting population, in which most representation went to majority white counties. This was a significant change from the status quo, where seats were based on population, and wealthy whites in majority Black counties reaped additional representation on account of the voter suppression of Blacks.
The convention, held in the state capital of Jackson, also created new majority white districts out of several majority Black counties. Finally, to guarantee white control of state politics, delegates implemented an electoral college for choosing the governor, called the “unit system,” in which a candidate would have to win a majority of votes and a majority of counties to claim victory.
Mississippi completed its new constitution just as the Lodge bill moved from the House of Representatives — where it passed without a single Democratic vote — to the Senate. And in the debate over the bill, Mississippi’s plan to disenfranchise its Black population took center stage. “The white body of the South will forever keep the colored people as a lower stratum, without political power or social significance,” Senator Henry Blair of New Hampshire said, “until the time when the masses of the white people themselves have intelligence enough to know what real freedom is and to cast that ballot which ordains liberty for the millions of all races, and not the elevation and power for the few of one.”
Not every Republican, however, thought the bill was necessary. Some, explains Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” were convinced that the party’s “procapitalist, pro-economic development, protariff views” would “attract a new white constituency in the South while shoring up Republican support elsewhere.” The party, they argued, did not need Black voters to thrive.
Division among Republicans allowed Democrats to take the initiative. They delayed debate on the bill until after the November midterm elections, where Democrats won control of the House. When, in December, Republicans moved to open debate, Democrats objected again. “We are acting in a great deal of haste to propose at this time repressive measures for the passage of a repressive and coercive force bill for the people,” said Senator John Reagan of Texas.
When, later that month, the Lodge bill finally reached the floor of the Senate, it was met by a Democratic filibuster. Democrats blasted the proposal as an unconstitutional power grab, a “cunning contrivance to place in the hands of a minority the control of the institutions of this great people, with a bayonet for every ballot to perpetuate their ruin.”
Republicans pointed to the new Mississippi constitution as evidence the bill was needed. “No artifice, no expedient, no fraud, no violence, no disregard of public opinion in the North or of the moral sentiment of the world is going to deter the Solid South from maintaining its supremacy by a suppression of the colored vote,” proclaimed Senator Joseph Dolph of Oregon:
“Nothing but the exercise by Congress of the powers lodged in it by the federal Constitution and the power of the general government to enforce the legislation will ever succeed in securing the free exercise to citizens of the United States in those States of their right to free speech and to a free ballot.”
Debate continued into the next Congress. But when Democrats motioned to move on from the Lodge bill, a number of Republicans joined them. Some were simply exhausted, others opposed the bill outright as overreaching and unenforceable. By a vote of 35 to 34 with 19 abstentions, the Senate tabled the bill to take up other business. It would not return to the floor. The next time Congress would try to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment was more than 60 years later, with the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
With the death of the Lodge bill, the new Mississippi Constitution could take effect without federal interference. There were still the courts, but the Supreme Court would eventually rule in 1898 that the disenfranchisement clauses of the constitution “do not on their face discriminate between the races.”
By the end of the decade, in 1900, most of the rest of the South had followed Mississippi down the path of official white supremacy and total suppression of Black voting. Circumstances varied from the state to state, but the dynamics were the same: first came biracial agrarian rebellion, then new constitutions, new restrictions, and a new equilibrium of white elite dominance over land, labor and capital.
It is too much to say that the Lodge bill alone would have stopped this; the rise of industrial capitalism in the North, the profound economic downturn in the South and the spread of virulently racist ideology throughout white society are among the factors that led to Jim Crow and the triumph of Southern reaction at turn of the 20th century.
But none of it was foreordained, and a forthright defense of the right of Americans to vote, to participate in politics and to govern themselves may have kept the worst of the era at bay. No historical comparison is ever exact, but Americans today should take note.
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March 4, 2021
https://www.devilslakejournal.com/story/opinion/2021/03/04/martinez-back-into-custody-refusal-cooperate-grand-jury/6920543002/
Bismarck – Water Protector Steve Martinez was taken back into federal custody in Bismarck, North Dakota yesterday following an appearance before the federal Grand Jury. Martinez is also being fined $50 a day for every day he maintains his refusal to give testimony. He continues to stand in solidarity with his Indigenous relatives and Water Protectors by refusing to testify or cooperate with this secretive and unjust process.
More:Water Protector Steve Martinez ordered to be released
On February 24th, after being jailed for 19 days for refusal to cooperate with the Grand Jury subpoena served to him, Martinez said:
"I was served another subpoena before I was released, making it the third one. My lawyers are working hard to keep me from being imprisoned for standing up for my constitutional rights as an American citizen. After having my rights stripped from me, I was imprisoned with no charges for 19 days. Even with the work of our legal team, the chances are high that I will be imprisoned once again for up to 18 months or the duration of the grand jury. I humbly ask for your continued prayers & support as I continue to speak volumes through my silence. Thank you. MNI WICONI, WATER IS LIFE."
Martinez was previously subpoenaed in 2016 to a Grand Jury allegedly seeking information regarding the injuries incurred by Sophia Wilansky in November 2016 at Standing Rock; a now infamous night where law enforcement used fire hoses on Water Protectors in freezing temperatures. Wilansky was gravely injured, nearly losing her arm, and unable to receive emergency medical transport due to the blockades implemented by law enforcement and the State of North Dakota. Martinez acted as a good Samaritan on that night, driving Wilanksy in his vehicle to receive emergency medical care. He was then summoned to appear before a grand jury and refused to cooperate.
More:Indigenous Water Protector Jailed in North Dakota for Refusing to Cooperate With Secret Grand Jury
Four years later, Martinez is once again being targeted by the government and detained for his principled refusal to participate in a secret process that has historically been highly susceptible to politically motivated abuses. "The secrecy of federal grand jury proceedings and the unfettered power and discretion that federal prosecutors have in the proceedings makes federal grand juries ripe for abuse against dissident political activists and their movements," said James Clark, a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild. "Mr. Martinez's saga with federal grand juries seems to have already been characterized by a number of procedural abuses and irregularities, such as his incarceration last month by a magistrate judge who lacked legal authority to order it," Clark continued.
Chava Shapiro, a legal worker and supporter of Martinez since 2016 said:
“We are all standing in solidarity with his choice to invoke his constitutionally protected right to silence to the Grand Jury. Political activists know that Grand Juries have historically been used as a tool of political repression against Indigenous people in their efforts to maintain sovereignty, push the United States government to honor treaties, and achieve self-determination for their relatives and nations. The best and safest choice for Steve and for all those who protect the water is to maintain silence in the face of this Grand Jury.”
K. William Boyer is the Managing Editor of the Devils Lake News Journal. He can be reached at kboyer@gannett.com, or by phone at (701) 662-2127.
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