Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, August 1, 2023

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

 

August 9: National Day of Protest to Drop the Charges on the Tampa 5!

Sign the Petition:

https://peoplespetitions.org/tampa5

 

The Tampa 5—Gia Davila, Lauren Pineiro, Laura Rodriguez, Jeanie K, and Chrisley Carpio—are the five Students for a Democratic Society protesters at the University of South Florida who were attacked by campus police and are now facing five to ten years in prison for protesting Governor Ron DeSantis' attacks on diversity programs and all of higher education.

 

On July 12, 2023, the Tampa 5 had their second court appearance. At this pretrial hearing, they learned that a trial date will be set by the judge on August 9, at their next court appearance.

 

The Tampa 5 are still in the middle of the process of discovery, which means that they are obtaining evidence from the prosecution that is meant to convict them. They have said publicly that all the security camera footage they have seen so far absolves them, and they are eager to not only receive more of this evidence but also to share it with the world. The Tampa 5 and their supporters demand full transparency and USF's full cooperation with discovery, to which all of the defendants are entitled.

 

In spite of this, the charges have not yet been dropped. The case of the five SDS protesters is hurtling towards a trial. So, they need all of their supporters and all parties interested in the right to protest DeSantis to stay out in the streets!

 

On August 9, the Emergency Committee to Defend the Tampa 5 is calling on all member groups to declare a National Day of Protest! On July 12, we saw at least 15 cities pour out into the streets to say, "Drop the charges!"

 

We need to be out again on August 9 in even greater numbers. We need to demand that the DeSantis-appointed, unelected State Attorney Susan Lopez and Assistant Prosecutor Justin Diaz drop the charges.

 

We need to win this case once and for all and protect the right of the student movement—and all social movements in the United States—to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech and to protest.

 

All Out for July August 9 to Defend the Tampa 5!

 

State Attorney Susy Lopez, Prosecutor Justin Diaz, Drop the Charges!

 

Save Diversity in Higher Education!

 

Protesting DeSantis is Not a Crime!

How you you can help:

 

1. Host any or all of the Tampa 5 in your city or on your local campus as we conduct a speaking tour around the country

 

2. Sign your organization onto this petition and help us spread the word about the Tampa 5:

 https://peoplespetitions.org/tampa5

 

The Tampa 5 are students and workers who attended a Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society protest on March 6th to save diversity programs at the University of South Florida and to oppose Ron DeSantis' anti-education bill, HB999. They were attacked, arrested, and now charged with felonies by the University of South Florida Police Department. Their felonies and potential prison time were doubled by the unelected, DeSantis-appointed state attorney, Susan Lopez, and her underling, Justin Diaz. They now face five to ten years in prison for exercising their right to protest and freedom of speech. The students were suspended and one of the five, the campus worker, Chrisley Carpio, was fired from her job at the university.

 

On June 24th, over 130 attendees of an emergency defense conference founded a new organization: the Emergency Committee to Defend the Tampa 5, which is national in scope. We are embarking on a long-term defense campaign to get the charges dropped and to defend the right to free speech in the state of Florida, and we need your help!

 

Thanks so much for your solidarity and support so far, and we'll see you in the streets!

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

No one is coming to save us, but us.

 

We need visionary politics, collective strategy, and compassionate communities now more than ever. In a moment of political uncertainty, the Socialism Conference—September 1-4, in Chicago—will be a vital gathering space for today’s left. Join thousands of organizers, activists, and socialists to learn from each other and from history, assess ongoing struggles, build community, and experience the energy of in-person gatherings.

 

Featured speakers at Socialism 2023 will include: Naomi Klein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D.G. Kelley, aja monet, Bettina Love, Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, Sophie Lewis, Harsha Walia, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Astra Taylor, Malcolm Harris, Kelly Hayes, Daniel Denvir, Emily Drabinski, Ilya Budraitskis, Dave Zirin, and many more.

 

The Socialism Conference is brought to you by Haymarket Books and dozens of endorsing left-wing organizations and publications, including Jacobin, DSA, EWOC, In These Times, Debt Collective, Dream Defenders, the Autonomous Tenant Union Network, N+1, Jewish Currents, Lux, Verso Books, Pluto Press, and many more. 

 

Register for Socialism 2023 by July 7 for the early bird discounted rate! Registering TODAY is the single best way you can help support, sustain, and expand the Socialism Conference. The sooner that conference organizers can gauge conference attendance, the bigger and better the conference will be!

 

Learn more and register for Socialism 2023

September 1-4, 2023, Chicago

https://socialismconference.org/?utm_source=Jacobin&utm_campaign=54423c5cc0-

 

Attendees are expected to wear a mask (N95, K95, or surgical mask) over their mouth and nose while indoors at the conference. Masks will be provided for those who do not have one.

 

A number of sessions from the conference will also be live-streamed virtually so that those unable to attend in person can still join us.

Copyright © 2023 Jacobin, All rights reserved.

You are receiving these messages because you opted in through our signup form, or at time of subscription/purchase.

 

Our mailing address is:

Jacobin

388 Atlantic Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11217-3399

 

Add us to your address book:

publicity@jacobinmag.com

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Free Julian Assange

Immediate Repeated Action Needed to Free Assange

 

Please call your Congressional Representatives, the White House, and the DOJ. Calls are tallied—they do count.  We are to believe we are represented in this country.  This is a political case, so our efforts can change things politically as well.  Please take this action as often as you can:

 

Find your representatives:

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

 

Leave each of your representatives a message individually to: 

·      Drop the charges against Julian Assange

·      Speak out publicly against the indictment and

·      Sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to the DOJ to drop the charges: 

           202-224-3121—Capitol Main Switchboard 

 

Leave a message on the White House comment line to 

Demand Julian Assange be pardoned: 

             202-456-1111

             Tuesday–Thursday, 11:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M. EST

 

Call the DOJ and demand they drop the charges against Julian Assange:

             202-353-1555—DOJ Comment Line

             202-514-2000 Main Switchboard 

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!

FREE HIM NOW!

Write to Mumia at:

Smart Communications/PADOC

Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335

SCI Mahanoy

P.O. Box 33028

St. Petersburg, FL 33733

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  Ruchell “Cinque” Magee Walks Free!

On July 28, he was released from prison after 67 years of being caged!

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

We’re raising money to ease his transition to the outside and I’m writing to ask for your help by making a donation. We have launched a Fundrazr on-line to collect funds. Here is the link:  

https://fundrazr.com/82E6S2?ref=ab_fCEmqa

 

Will you help? And share, too?

✊🏽✊🏼✊🏾✊🏿

Thanks to Michael Schiffmann and Linn Washington Jr. Addressing the Issue of Political Prisoners in the United States: Mumia Abu-Jamal and Ruchell Magee

 

A more in-depth and recent article on Ruchell, “Slave Rebel or Citizen?” is very worthwhile by Joy James and Kalonji Jama Changa. Read it here: 

https://inquest.org/slave-rebel-or-citizen/

 

And more background – the “50th Anniversary of the Marin Courthouse Rebellion:”

https://freedomarchives.org/projects/the-50th-anniversary-of-the-august-7th-marin-county-courthouse-rebellion/

 

Also the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of George Jackson—99 Books

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Previously Recorded

View on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeIfVB7IykQ

 

 

Featured Speakers:

 

Yuliya Yurchenko, Senior Lecturer at the University of Greenwich and author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketization to Armed Conflict.

 

Vladyslav Starodubstev, historian of Central and Eastern European region, and member of the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh.

 

Kirill Medvedev, poet, political writer, and member of the Russian Socialist Movement.

 

Kavita Krishnan, Indian feminist, author of Fearless Freedom, former leader of the Communist Party of India (ML).

 

Bill Fletcher, former President of TransAfrica Forum, former senior staff person at the AFL-CIO, and Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.

 

Including solidarity statements from among others Barbara Smith, Eric Draitser, Haley Pessin, Ramah Kudaimi, Dave Zirin, Frieda Afary, Jose La Luz, Rob Barrill, and Cindy Domingo.

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Update on Ed Poindexter and Urgent Health Call-In Campaign

 

Watch the moving video of Ed's Niece and Sister at the April 26, 2023, UN EMLER Hearing in Atlanta: https://youtu.be/aKwV7LQ5iww

 

You can also watch Ed speaking about himself some years ago thanks to Sister Tekla, who was able to interview Ed and Mondo some years ago: https://youtu.be/sps0s4zeJxg.

More of these videos will be forthcoming.

 

Ed needs to be released to live the rest of his life outside of prison, with his family! (His niece Ericka is now 52 years old and was an infant when Ed was targeted, stolen from his home, jailed, framed, and railroaded.)

 

Friends and Comrades,

 

Thank you so very much for your phone calls and communications in support of Ed Poindexter’s health care!

 

We have learned from Ed’s family that a date has been set for Ed to go to an outside doctor to be evaluated for a hearing device. (Thank you, callers!) We have also learned that Ed will not be fitted for a prosthesis within the foreseeable future. The reason for this is that Ed is unable to sit up for more than a few seconds on his own. He is unable to get himself out of bed by himself. Ed cannot go to the restroom without substantial help. There is a fear of him falling.

 

The prison’s response has been to suggest that Ed try harder at physical therapy—so that he might be able to tie his own shoes again and perform basic self-care—but he cannot. Our position is that he is too weak because of the near daily kidney dialysis and multiple other health problems. As you know, he has lost sight in one eye, and is unable to hear. While he may have been weakened by being wheelchair bound for years, the fact that the institution amputated his left leg below the knee (without notice to the family) has made recovery of strength in his legs difficult. Add to this that Ed is extremely ill from kidney disease, and the near daily kidney dialysis artificially making his kidney’s function causes him to vomit his food and makes him ill overall. All of these combined illnesses have resulted in Ed not being able to even hold his frame upright for more than a few seconds.

 

Therefore, in protection of Ed’s basic rights as a human being to health care and human dignity, we demand that Ed be seen by an outside high ranking National Medical Association Certified geriatric physician or team of physicians who specialize in heart, kidney, and geriatric health. We demand the evaluation be by a physician connected to a reputable hospital so that Ed’s entire condition: eyes, heart (recall that Ed underwent triple bypass heart surgery in 2016) kidneys, neuropathy, amputated leg, serious inability to balance his frame, and hearing can all be evaluated as a whole.

 

It is the family’s belief that Ed is experiencing a diminishing quality of life that it is irreversible, and we demand an outside doctor also evaluate him for this obvious fact. If it is determined by a reputable doctor that Ed is experiencing a diminishing quality of life; we want his status changed at the prison to reflect this reality.

 

Please call the numbers below and write to demand that Ed be seen by an outside doctor at a state-of-the-art hospital facility—for the purpose of evaluation specifically as to whether his condition is diminishing and irreversible—taken as a whole.

 

Ed Support Committee and Family and Concerned Members of the Community

 

PLEASE CALL, EMAIL AND WRITE:

 

Acting Medical Director Jeff Kasselman, M.D.: 402-479-5931 jeffrey.kasselman@nebraska.gov

 

Warden Boyd of the Reception and Treatment Center: 402-471-2861

 

Warden: Taggart Boyd

Reception and Treatment Center

P.O. Box 22800

Lincoln, NE 68542-2800

Phone: 402-471-2861

Fax: 402-479-6100

 

Jeff Kasselman, M.D.

Acting Medical Director,

Nebraska Department of Corrections

Phone: 402-479-5931

Email: jeffrey.kasselman@nebraska.gov

 

Sample Message:

 

“I’m calling to urge that Ed Poindexter, #27767, be given appropriate medical care. I demand that be seen by an outside high ranking National Medical Association certified geriatric physician or team of physicians who specialize in heart, kidney, and geriatric health. I demand the evaluation include Ed’s entire condition: eyes, kidneys, diabetes, neuropathy, amputated leg, serious inability to balance his frame, and hearing. ”

 

You can read more about Ed Poindexter at:

https://www.thejerichomovement.com/profile/poindexter-ed

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Updates From Kevin Cooper 

March 23, 2023 

Dear Friends and Comrades, 

This is Kevin Cooper writing and sending this update to you in 'Peace & Solidarity'. First and foremost I am well and healthy, and over the ill effect(s) that I went through after that biased report from MoFo, and their pro prosecution and law enforcement experts. I am back working with my legal team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.

'We' have made great progress in refuting all that those experts from MoFo came up with by twisting the truth to fit their narrative, or omitting things, ignoring, things, and using all the other tactics that they did to reach their conclusions. Orrick has hired four(4) real experts who have no questionable backgrounds. One is a DNA attorney, like Barry Scheck of the innocence project in New York is for example. A DNA expert, a expect to refute what they say Jousha Ryen said when he was a child, and his memory. A expect on the credibility of MoFo's experts, and the attorney's at Orrick are dealing with the legal issues.

This all is taking a little longer than we first expected it to take, and that in part is because 'we' have to make sure everything is correct in what we have in our reply. We cannot put ourselves in a situation where we can be refuted... Second, some of our experts had other things planned, like court cases and such before they got the phone call from Rene, the now lead attorney of the Orrick team. With that being said, I can say that our experts, and legal team have shown, and will show to the power(s) that be that MoFo's DNA expert could not have come to the conclusion(s) that he came to, without having used 'junk science'! They, and by they I mean my entire legal team, including our experts, have done what we have done ever since Orrick took my case on in 2004, shown that all that is being said by MoFo's experts is not true, and we are once again having to show what the truth really is.

Will this work with the Governor? Who knows... 'but' we are going to try! One of our comrades, Rebecca D.   said to me, 'You and Mumia'...meaning that my case and the case of Mumia Abu Jamal are cases in which no matter what evidence comes out supporting our innocence, or prosecution misconduct, we cannot get a break. That the forces in the so called justice system won't let us go. 'Yes' she is correct about that sad to say...

Our reply will be out hopefully in the not too distant future, and that's because the people in Sacramento have been put on notice that it is coming, and why. Every one of you will receive our draft copy of the reply according to Rene because he wants feedback on it. Carole and others will send it out once they receive it. 'We' were on the verge of getting me out, and those people knew it, so they sabotaged what the Governor ordered them to do, look at all the evidence as well as the DNA evidence. They did not do that, they made this a DNA case, by doing what they did, and twisted the facts on the other issues that they dealt with.   'more later'...

In Struggle & Solidarity,

March 28, 2023

"Today is March 28, 2023

I spoke to Rene, the lead attorney. He hopes to have our reply [to the Morrison Forster report] done by April 14 and sent out with a massive Public Relations blast.

He said that the draft copy, which everyone will see, should be available April 10th. 

I will have a visit with two of the attorneys to go over the draft copy and express any concerns I have with it.

MoFo ex-law enforcement “experts” are not qualified to write what they wrote or do what they did.

Another of our expert reports has come in and there are still two more that we’re waiting for—the DNA report and Professor Bazelon’s report on what an innocence investigation is and what it is not. We are also expecting a report from the Innocence Network. All the regional Innocence Projects (like the Northern California Innocence Project) in the country belong to the Innocence Network.

If MoFo had done the right thing, I would be getting out of here, but because they knew that, somewhere along the line they got hijacked, so we have to continue this fight but we think we can win."

An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:

Mr. Kevin Cooper

C-65304. 4-EB-82

San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin, CA 94974

 

Background on Kevin's Case

Orrick

January 14, 2023

Kevin Cooper has suffered imprisonment as a death row inmate for more than 38 years for a gruesome crime he did not commit. We are therefore extremely disappointed by the special counsel’s report to the Board of Parole Hearings and disagree strongly with its findings.  Most fundamentally, we are shocked that the governor seemingly failed to conduct a thorough review of the report that contains many misstatements and omissions and also ignores the purpose of a legitimate innocence investigation, which is to independently determine whether Mr. Cooper’s conviction was a product of prosecutorial misconduct. The report failed to address that critical issue. The evidence when viewed in this light reveals that Kevin Cooper is innocent of the Ryen/Hughes murders, and that he was framed by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department. 

 

The special counsel’s investigation ordered by Governor Newsom in May 2021 was not properly conducted and is demonstrably incomplete. It failed to carry out the type of thorough investigation required to explore the extensive evidence that Mr. Cooper was wrongfully convicted. Among other things, the investigation failed to even subpoena and then examine the files of the prosecutors and interview the individuals involved in the prosecution. For unknown reasons and resulting in the tragic and clearly erroneous conclusion that he reached, the special counsel failed to follow the basic steps taken by all innocence investigations that have led to so many exonerations of the wrongfully convicted. 

 

In effect the special counsel’s report says: the Board of Parole Hearings can and will ignore Brady violations, destruction of exculpatory evidence, planted evidence, racial prejudice, prosecutorial malfeasance, and ineffective assistance of trial counsel; since I conclude Cooper is guilty based on what the prosecution says, none of these Constitutional violations matter or will be considered and we have no obligation to investigate these claims.

 

Given that (1) we have already uncovered seven prosecutorial violations of Brady v. Maryland during Mr. Cooper’s prosecution, (2) one of the likely killers has confessed to three different parties that he, rather than Mr. Cooper, was involved in the Ryen/Hughes murders, and (3) there is significant evidence of racial bias in Mr. Cooper’s prosecution, we cannot understand how Mr. Cooper was not declared wrongfully convicted.  The special counsel specifically declined to address ineffective assistance of counsel at the trial or the effect of race discrimination.  We call on the governor to follow through on his word and obtain a true innocence investigation.

Anything But Justice for Black People

Statement from Kevin Cooper concerning recent the decision on his case by Morrison Forrester Law Firm

In 2020 and 2022 Governor Newsom signed in to law the “Racial Justice Act.” This is because the California legislature, and the Governor both acknowledged that the criminal justice system in California is anything but justice for Black people.

On May 28th, 2021, Governor signed an executive order to allow the law firm of Morrison Forrester (MoFo) to do an independent investigation in my case which included reading the trial and appellant transcripts, my innocence claims, and information brought to light by the 9th circuit court of appeals, as well as anything else not in the record, but relevant to this case.

So, Mr. Mark McDonald, Esq, who headed this investigation by Morrison Forrester and his associates at the law firm, went and did what was not part of Governor Newsom’s order, and they did this during the length of time that they were working on this case, and executive order. They worked with law enforcement, current and former members of the L.A. Sheriff’s department, and other law enforcement-type people and organizations.

Law enforcement is the first part of this state’s criminal justice system. A system that both the California legislature, and the Governor acknowledge to be racist, and cannot be trusted to tell the truth, will present, and use false evidence to obtain a conviction, will withhold material exculpatory evidence, and will do everything else that is written in those two racial justice act bills that were signed into law.

So, with the active help of those pro-police, pro-prosecutor, pro-death penalty people working on this case to uphold my bogus conviction we cannot be surprised about the recent decision handed down by them in this case.

While these results are not true but based on the decisions made in 1983 and 1984 by the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, these 2023 results were not reached by following the executive orders of Governor Newsom.

They ignored his orders and went out to make sure that I am either executed or will never get out of prison.

Governor Newsom cannot let this stand because he did not order a pro-cop or pro-prosecutor investigation, he ordered an independent investigation.

We all know that in truth, law enforcement protects each other, they stand by each other, no matter what city, county, or state that they come from. This is especially true when a Black man like me states that I was framed for murder by law enforcement who just happened to be in the neighboring county.

No one should be surprised about the law enforcement part in this, but we must be outraged by the law firm Morrison Forrester for being a part of this and then try to sell it as legitimate. We ain’t stupid and everyone who knows the truth about my case can see right through this bullshit.

I will continue to fight not only for my life, and to get out of here, but to end the death penalty as well. My entire legal team, family and friends and supporters will continue as well. We have to get to the Governor and let him know that he cannot accept these bogus rehashed results.

MoFo and their pro-prosecution and pro-police friends did not even deal with, or even acknowledge the constitutional violations in my case. They did not mention the seven Brady violations which meant the seven pieces of material exculpatory evidence were withheld from my trial attorney and the jury, and the 1991 California Supreme court that heard and upheld this bogus conviction. Why, one must ask, did they ignore these constitutional violations and everything that we proved in the past that went to my innocence?

Could it be that they just didn’t give a damn about the truth but just wanted to uphold this conviction by any means necessary?

No matter their reasons, they did not do what Governor Gavin Newsom ordered them to do in his May 28, 2021, executive order and we cannot let them get away with this.

I ask each and every person who reads this to contact the Governor’s office and voice your outrage over what MoFo did, and demand that he not accept their decision because they did not do what he ordered them to do which was to conduct an independent investigation!

In Struggle and Solidarity

From Death Row at San Quentin Prison,

Kevin Cooper

 

Call California Governor Newsom:

1-(916) 445-2841

Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish, 

press 6 to speak with a representative and

wait for someone to answer 

(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

                   

The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system. 

See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Sign the petition:

https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale

 

I’m pleased to announce that last week our client, Daniel Hale, was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. The “Corner-Brightener Candlestick” was presented to Daniel’s friend Noor Mir. You can watch the online ceremony here. As it happens, this week is also the 20th anniversary of the first drone assassination in Yemen. From the beginning, the drone assassination program has been deeply shrouded in secrecy, allowing U.S. officials to hide significant violations of international law, and the American Constitution. In addition to the lives directly impacted by these strikes, the program has significantly eroded respect for international law and thereby puts civilians around the world in danger. Daniel Hale’s revelations threw a beam of light into a very dark corner, allowing journalists to definitively show that the government's official narrative was a lie. It is thanks to the great personal sacrifice of drone whistleblowers like Hale that public understanding has finally begun to catch up to reality. As the Sam Adams Associates note:  “Mr. Hale was well aware of the cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment to which other courageous officials have been subjected — and that he would likely suffer the same. And yet — in the manner of his famous ancestor Nathan Hale — he put his country first, knowing what awaited him at the hands of those who serve what has become a repressive Perpetual War State wreaking havoc upon much of the world.” We hope you’ll join the growing call to pardon or commute Hale’s sentence. U.S. citizens can contact your representatives here.

Happy new year, and thank you for your support! Jesselyn Radack Director Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) ExposeFacts Twitter: @JesselynRadack

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Laws are created to be followed

by the poor.

Laws are made by the rich

to bring some order to exploitation.

The poor are the only law abiders in history.

When the poor make laws

the rich will be no more.

 

—Roque Dalton Presente!

(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]

---

[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.

Poems: 

http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/

About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Self Portrait by Leonard Peltier

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be

Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

The Moment

By Margaret Atwood*

 

The moment when, after many years 

of hard work and a long voyage 

you stand in the centre of your room, 

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, 

knowing at last how you got there, 

and say, I own this, 

 

is the same moment when the trees unloose 

their soft arms from around you, 

the birds take back their language, 

the cliffs fissure and collapse, 

the air moves back from you like a wave 

and you can't breathe. 

 

No, they whisper. You own nothing. 

You were a visitor, time after time 

climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. 

We never belonged to you. 

You never found us. 

It was always the other way round.

 

*Witten by the woman who wrote a novel about Christian fascists taking over the U.S. and enslaving women. Prescient!

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

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

 

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:

 

National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

Articles

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

1) More Public Pools Could Save Thousands of Lives

By Mara Gay, July 27, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/opinion/drowning-public-pools-america.html

In a still image from a video shot by Jules Cahn in 1969, a celebration on the first day that the Audubon Park pool in New Orleans opened to all races. Credit...The Historic New Orleans Collection

As a young child in New Orleans, Raychelle Ross fell into one of the city’s many canals and nearly drowned.

 

Years later, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the city, Ms. Ross fled the rising waters on a bus with two tiny babies in tow.

 

In 2016, one of those children, Bennasia, drowned in a backyard pool. “I don’t play with water,” Ms. Ross told me. “I’ve always been afraid.”

 

Bennasia was one of the estimated 4,000 people who die by drowning every year across the United States in a public health crisis America has largely ignored. As summers grow hotter, taking a dip at the nearest swimming hole could offer some of the balm that this weary, divided country needs: a chance to cool off and play together, to get healthier, to have some fun. Instead, the United States is, for a majority of its citizens, a swimming desert where, according to a Red Cross survey, more than half of the population lacks basic swimming abilities and millions are without access to safe places to enter the water. Many in Black American families don’t know how to swim or don’t know how to swim well. Millions of Americans of other races don’t, either. On average, 11 people die by drowning every day.

 

After years of inaction by authorities, this rolling American disaster is finally beginning to draw some of the attention needed to save lives. A coalition of experts this summer published the first ever U.S. Water Safety Action Plan, a much-needed, 10-year national road map to reduce drowning. The United States is one of the few developed countries in the world without such a plan. Some recommendations, like increasing the use of life jackets in lakes, oceans and rivers, could be carried out by states and local governments. Others — like the creation of a public health surveillance system to collect better data around drowning — are worthy of urgent action from the White House and Congress.

 

Hiding in plain sight, though, is a much larger opportunity to significantly reshape the way we live with the water around us, in the country’s biggest cities, in its most remote rivers and lakes and in its suburbs. The United States doesn’t have to accept these deaths. Nor does it have to retreat from the water to save lives. America can build more public pools. It can transform natural bodies of water into safer places to swim. It can subsidize swimming lessons and raise pay for lifeguards, making the job more attractive. The United States can build a culture of swimming instead of one of drowning.

 

A health crisis ignored

 

The national data, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is sobering: Drowning is the leading cause of death among 1-to-4-year-olds, the second-leading cause of accidental deaths by injury among children 5 to 14 and the third-leading cause of accidental death by injury for Americans 24 years and younger. Younger Black adolescents are more than three times as likely to fatally drown as their white peers; Native American and Alaskan Native young adults are twice as likely to fatally drown as white Americans. Eight in 10 drowning victims in the United States are male. Children with autism are 160 times as likely to fatally drown or experience near-fatal drowning, a serious medical event that can cause severe and often permanent physical harm. The C.D.C. estimates that drowning costs the U.S. economy $53 billion each year.

 

Despite this, the work of water safety has largely been left to nonprofit groups, which, no matter how dedicated, cannot reach every American. Congress and the White House could act together to fix this and save lives. Requiring a federal agency to oversee drowning prevention policy and build a better public health surveillance system around drowning deaths, both recommendations in the plan, would be a good start. But the transformative move would be to build far more public pools across the United States.

 

Too few public pools

 

There are more than 10 million private swimming pools in the United States, according to a C.D.C. estimate, compared with just 309,000 public ones. That figure includes pools that belong to condo complexes, hotels and schools, so the number of pools truly accessible to the public is even smaller. The biggest reason so many Americans can’t swim is that they have too few places to learn to do so.

 

By many available measures, public pools can be the safest places to swim. They are likelier to be better maintained and importantly, staffed by lifeguards. Many provide free or low-cost swim lessons, something millions of Americans couldn’t otherwise afford. They give kids a safe place to play. They offer the promise of a safe dip to anyone who wants one and to many who have nowhere else to go.

 

Yet the United States hasn’t made a serious investment in public pools since the Great Depression, when scores of grand public pools were erected in many parts of the country under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, according to Jeff Wiltse, the author of “Contested Waters,” a book about the history of swimming pools.

 

Then the expansion stopped. In the 1960s, many towns across the South filled or destroyed their public pools rather than allow Black Americans to swim in them. Northern cities, strapped for resources amid suburbanization and white flight, struggled to maintain their pools. This is how public investment in pools withered, one more ghastly sacrifice America has laid at the altar of anti-Black racism and twisted fears about miscegenation.

 

White Americans with the means to do so built private pools and joined exclusive swim clubs instead. As their children swam, entire generations of Black Americans, white Americans living in poverty and others were denied the chance to learn a skill that can save lives, can bring joy and is arguably the birthright of every human being. Many parents who never learned to swim have struggled to provide that opportunity to their children or passed down their fears around water, continuing the cycle.

 

The Reagan era, which glorified privatization and smaller government, only cemented the mind-set that led the country to abandon the idea that public pools should be a national priority. “There’s a fantastic amount of wealth within the United States, and yet we’re extraordinarily parsimonious in our willingness to fund public swimming pools,” Mr. Wiltse told me. In America today, swimming is a luxury, not a public good.

 

In this summer’s widespread heat wave, millions of Americans are sweating it out without a safe place to swim. The dearth of public pools makes it harder to learn basic water safety skills or simply cool off in a country broiling from the extreme heat of climate change. The problem has been exacerbated in recent years by a national lifeguard shortage, leading to partly closed beaches and public pools. Along the New York City waterfront this summer, hordes of swimmers are crowding together in small sections of sand while expanses of beach sit empty for want of lifeguards. Lines of sweaty New Yorkers form outside city pools that are operating at reduced capacity.

 

Dangerous waters

 

One reason drowning rates are so high is that when a safe place to swim isn’t readily available, Americans often enter the water anyway, seeking relief from the heat wherever they can. In New York City alone, at least four teenagers have drowned since 2010 trying to swim in the Bronx River. The Bronx is home to more than 1.4 million people but has just eight open public pools. That’s about one pool for every 175,000 people.

 

In New Orleans, Ms. Ross said, she frequently struggled to find a place for her children to swim, something they loved to do. The city was once home to the historic Audubon Park Natatorium, which was the largest public pool in the South. In 1962, though, the city shuttered the pool rather than integrate it. In 1998 the once-majestic amenity was replaced with a far smaller pool.

 

When Ms. Ross and her children were invited to a pool party on a steamy day in May 2016, they leaped at the chance. She said that the backyard pool Bennasia drowned in was so dirty that it took several minutes before anyone noticed the little girl’s body floating just beneath the surface. “She was my ball of light,” Ms. Ross said. “I couldn’t help her. I don’t know how to swim.”

 

Drowning is a serious problem in rural America, too. In August 2017, Kathy Grasser took her sons — Isaac, 17, and Michael, 11 — swimming in Idaho’s Pend Oreille River, a wide stretch of water lined with pine trees less than 100 miles from the border with Canada. The dock along the waterfront was busy, so the family entered the river along an unfamiliar spot. At first the boys wore life jackets, since neither was a strong swimmer, Ms. Grasser told me.

 

Soon, though, the boys removed them, thinking the water was shallow. It was not. Isaac unknowingly drifted to an area just off the bank where the riverbed plunged steeply. The water was over his head when a swift current began to take him away. When she swam toward him to help, Isaac panicked and tried to climb on top of her — a behavior exhibited by many drowning people. Michael moved toward them, trying to help. “Michael was fearless in the water, but he didn’t know how to swim,” she said. Both boys drowned. Ms. Grasser survived.

 

Drowning rates are 1.4 times as high in rural areas as in cities and suburbs, according to C.D.C. data. Experts say much more can be done to save lives, like building public pools, expanding water safety education and creating designated swimming areas at lakes and rivers in rural communities to help people know where it’s safer to swim, and where it isn’t.

 

Idaho has one of the highest rates of drowning in the United States. The state has thousands of miles of navigable rivers and canals but few public pools. “We don’t have very many public facilities. We have kids swimming in canals, in rivers, in ponds with dark water, murky water,” Earle Swope, the director of the Idaho Drowning Prevention Coalition, told me by phone. “It’s extremely dangerous.”

 

Beyond more public pools, Mr. Swope said, even smaller solutions — like improving signage around water to denote unseen hazards and keeping lifesaving flotation rings along shorelines in case of emergency — could save lives.

 

Basic water safety awareness

 

The United States over the past 50 years has adopted critical public health campaigns — from seatbelt use to banning cigarette smoking from most bars and restaurants — that have saved millions of lives. Yet a lack of basic safety instruction around swimming in the United States has left Americans of all backgrounds less safe around the water.

 

Dana Gage believes her son Connor’s 2012 death could have been prevented if the basic elements of water safety had been better known. Connor was a strong swimmer when he jumped off the roof of a boat dock into a Texas lake and never resurfaced alive.

 

Connor and his friends — also teenage boys — were engaging in behavior Ms. Gage now knows put him at high risk for drowning: They were swimming at night, without life jackets. He was 15 years old, an age when boys are especially at risk.

 

After Connor’s death, Ms. Gage founded the LV Project, a national nonprofit that supports water safety awareness, to share all she had learned. Many more lives could be saved if this critical work is taken up by the country at large.

 

“Why have Americans been left on their own?” asked Adam Katchmarchi, the executive director of the National Drowning Prevention Alliance, who served on the committee that created the national action plan. “There’s no sense that this should be a public priority.”

 

A place to swim for everyone

 

The most beloved public pools, when they receive good investment, attract Americans of many backgrounds, creating a space for people to swim and play together who may not otherwise interact. Like libraries and parks, they are an essential piece of social infrastructure in a democracy.

 

“You give people a place where they feel like they belong, where they have some sense of trust and faith in the government,” said Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist who studies public space and the author of “Palaces for the People,” a book about the contribution of libraries to public life. Instead, he told me, “we’ve created this environment where wealthy people in cities can go on the market and buy safe places for their children to play and swimming lessons.”

 

In a testament to the enormous value of public swimming pools, wealthier communities across the United States never stopped investing in them.

 

Coral Gables, Fla., has a colossal, stone-ringed public pool known as the Venetian, complete with waterfalls and grottoes. Austin, Texas, boasts a three-acre public pool fed by underground springs. Ann Arbor, Mich., has public pools with giant water slides. In 1960 the elegant Connecticut shore town of Westport bought the deed to a country club. Residents there swim in a public pool that sits beside the shimmering waters of the Long Island Sound.

 

Every American deserves the chance to swim somewhere just as nice.

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

2) We Know What Happens When We Prosecute Drug Dealers as Murderers

By Maia Szalavitz, July 28, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/opinion/fentanyl-mandatory-drug-sentences.html

Musubu Hagi

Stories of narcotics-related death and debasement flooded the media. Politicians stoked panic about marijuana. Parents feared that teenagers would tip into addiction. Congress held hearings.

 

“We need only to recall what we have read in the papers this past week to realize that more and more younger people are falling into the clutches of unscrupulous dope peddlers,” a representative insisted, urging passage of legislation imposing tough mandatory minimum sentences for drugs.

 

I might be describing events that occurred in the 1970s or 1980s, or even this year, as dozens of states and the federal government consider — and some enact — tougher penalties for users and sellers of fentanyl and its derivatives.

 

But the legislation mentioned here — the Boggs Act, named for Representative Hale Boggs of Louisiana — was signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1951. It remained on the books until 1970.

 

With the horror of some 100,000 annual overdose deaths in the 2020s, and the deadly nature of illegal synthetic drugs, it’s easy to think that imposing longer, tougher sentences might save lives by deterring sales. Some bereaved parents describe their children’s deaths as “poisonings” and want the government to treat fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” They demand that dealers be held to account with prison terms commensurate with murder, calling specifically for what are now labeled “drug-induced homicide” laws.

 

But the recent history of mandatory drug sentencing — nationally and in New York — holds crucial lessons for those who want to end today’s crisis of illegally manufactured fentanyl.

 

Already, some 30 states and the federal government allow for the prosecution of street fentanyl suppliers as murderers. And at least five require a mandatory life sentence. During the 2023 legislative season alone, fentanyl-related crime bills were introduced in 46 states. In Tennessee, for example, when three teenage girls overdosed in a high school parking lot this May, the 17-year-old sole survivor was charged with her classmates’ murder.

 

Parental fury is understandable. But the history of tough drug laws shows that they have never significantly reduced the drug supply, or lowered addiction rates or overdose deaths. In fact, drug busts may increase overdose risk while saddling addicted people with criminal records that lower their odds of recovery by making them less employable.

 

Our history of enacting — and then reforming — harsh mandatory drug sentencing legislation illustrates its failure.

 

Take the Boggs Act, which mandated two to five years for a first offense, five to 10 years for a second offense and 10 to 20 years for a third. It made no distinction between drug use and sales, or between marijuana and heroin. By 1955, however, lawmakers were already concerned that it wasn’t working, saying that the United States had the highest rate of addiction in the West — and blaming China for supplying heroin. They increased penalties in 1956. Still, drug use by teenagers and young adults continued rising. Indeed, what came next was the 1960s. About 90 percent of those who were born at the peak of the baby boom have at least experimented with illegal drugs.

 

Though by 1970 both parties agreed the Boggs Act had flopped, New York State’s moderate Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, didn’t take note of its ineffectiveness. In 1962, he had tried mandating lengthy periods of residential treatment for people with addiction. But in 1973 he reversed course. “In this state, we have allotted over $1 billion to every form of education against drugs and treatment of the addict through commitment, therapy and rehabilitation,” the governor said in his annual address to the legislature. “Let’s tell it like it is: We have achieved very little permanent rehabilitation and have found no cure.”

 

At the time, New York City was grappling with rising crime and increased heroin addiction, which rose with deindustrialization, social services cuts and the reduced tax base from so-called white flight.

 

The state legislature enacted what became known as the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973. They mandated a 15-years-to-life sentence, even on a first offense, for possession of four or more ounces or sales of two or more ounces of heroin, cocaine or marijuana. The sentencing was deliberately harsher than for rape or murder because drugs were seen as a crime against the whole community.

 

The laws did not reduce drug use or crime. Dealers began using children to run drugs in order to avoid these penalties. A 1978 study conducted by the Drug Abuse Council and the New York City Bar Association found no decrease in heroin use and no significant difference in other crime and drug-use rates compared with those in similar states. New York’s prison population more than quintupled from 1972 to 1992, to more than 60,000 from 12,000. Corrections spending rose to around 25 percent of the state’s general fund operations in the mid-1990s from 10 percent of the budget in the early 1980s.

 

By 1997, although Blacks and Latinos made up less than a quarter of the state’s population, they accounted for 94 percent of prisoners serving felony sentences for drug crimes. (The laws were amended to remove marijuana from the list of substances as early as 1979, when white college students started to face harsh penalties.)

 

By the mid-1980s, New York City had become one of the country’s main centers of crack cocaine use and distribution, with the murder rate peaking in 1990 at more than three times what it is now. Arrests rose, courts were clogged, and drug markets simply moved from one neighborhood to another or to sales via pager and phone when the heat got too high. Nearly half of Americans born in the early 1960s say they tried cocaine at least once. (I was one of them and I only narrowly escaped a 15-to-life term under the Rockefeller laws for selling it during my addiction, in part by luck and most likely in part because I was a white college student.)

 

Rockefeller’s crackdown had failed by every measure. And yet, despite all the evidence, Congress readopted mandatory minimum sentences for cocaine in 1986, imposing a five-year prison term for possession with intent to sell five grams of crack cocaine or 500 grams of powder cocaine. It toughened the law even more in 1988, with a 20-year maximum sentence permitted for even simple possession. Before this legislation passed, Black people sentenced for federal drug crimes served an average of 11 percent more time than whites; within four years, they were serving 49 percent more time.

 

New York repealed the Rockefeller drug laws in 2009. By that point there was again bipartisan agreement that mandatory minimums don’t work. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a bill that reduced federal mandatories for new crack convictions. A second bill, which made the reform retroactive, was signed President Donald Trump in 2018.

 

Mandatory sentencing also failed to curb overdose deaths. In 1979, they began escalating exponentially, a trend that was not heeded until the deaths of white rural Americans from prescription opioids began skyrocketing in the early 2000s.

 

In response, the government prosecuted doctors who ran “pill mills” and threatened other physicians with prison time simply for prescribing opioids at higher rates than their colleagues. Most patients who lost access to medical opioids were provided no treatment, leading many who were addicted to turn to far more deadly street heroin.

 

And as dealers began adding cheaper and more potent fentanyl to the supply, the death toll worsened. Arrests didn’t help: A recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that within a week of a local drug bust, overdose deaths in the immediate area doubled, as former customers sought new supplies from unfamiliar sources.

 

Law enforcement simply can’t stop addiction. Confirming earlier data, a 2018 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that states with more drug arrests and incarceration don’t have less drug use. Indeed, the United States, with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, still has the world’s highest rates of illegal drug use, along with the highest rates of illegal-drug-related death and disability.

 

The pain of parents who have lost children to overdose is crushing. But doubling down on counterproductive policies is not the answer. We know what happens when we sentence dealers on a par with murderers — mass incarceration of Black and brown people, and unaltered and ongoing widespread availability of drugs and death.

 

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Rockefeller drug laws. The worst way to recognize that grim marker would be by continuing to impose more and tougher mandatory sentencing laws.

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

3) Everything They Owned Burned, and They Still Can’t Get Restitution 102 Years Later

By Victor Luckerson, July 28, 2023

Mr. Luckerson is the author of “Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/opinion/tulsa-race-massacre-reparations.html

From left, I.H. Spears, Effie Thompson and B.C. Franklin in their temporary tent office after the Tulsa Race Massacre, 1921. Credit...Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images

Among the most famous images related to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is a photo of two Black attorneys sitting in a tent among the smoldered ruins of the Greenwood District. The date is June 6, 1921, less than a week after a white mob razed Greenwood, a thriving Oklahoma community known as Black Wall Street. The men, B.C. Franklin and I.H. Spears, are surrounded by salvaged law books and a diligent secretary sitting before a lone typewriter.

 

Outside the frame lies wholesale carnage: once-proud business enterprises reduced to charred husks and rows of trees stripped of all their foliage. But even before the physical reconstruction of Greenwood could begin, Mr. Franklin and his clients insisted that efforts at legal repair be put into motion. What Mr. Franklin and Mr. Spears knew then — that no one in power in the city, the state or the nation was likely to offer them restitution unprompted — would prove prescient, as would their determination to pursue it themselves.

 

On July 7, a Tulsa County district judge dismissed a recent lawsuit brought by three living survivors of the 1921 attack: Viola Fletcher, 109; Lessie Benningfield Randle, 108; and Hughes Van Ellis, 102. Their attorneys argued that the City of Tulsa and other government entities were directly involved in the decimation of Greenwood. Police officers deputized members of the white mob, witnesses reported seeing officers taking part in the destruction, and Tulsa’s mayor at the time, T.D. Evans, wrongly blamed a “negro uprising” for the destruction.

 

Though these incriminating facts are well documented, Judge Caroline Wall ultimately ruled that the court should not engage in the “management of public policy matters” by prescribing specific forms of repair for the Greenwood survivors and their community. The massacre was wrong, Judge Wall and many government officials seem to agree, but no one in particular can be held responsible for it.

 

In Tulsa, city leaders have over the past 102 years become adept at this sleight of hand — acknowledging the horror of the race massacre while punting responsibility for the moral and economic debt it has wrought. But what these leaders fail to acknowledge is that the institutions they helm played an active role in halting Greenwood’s progress after the massacre. The mob burned Greenwood and the courts fanned the flames when they refused to punish the attackers or offer redress to hundreds of newly destitute Tulsans who believed the law should be on their side.

 

The injustices began in those days as Greenwood burned outside Mr. Franklin’s tent. More than 70 plaintiffs with ties to the community, some of them represented by Mr. Franklin, filed lawsuits against the City of Tulsa between 1921 and 1923. Plaintiffs charged that the city had failed in its duty to protect citizens. Instead, it had deployed officials to take Greenwood residents to detention camps and allowed their homes to be burned to the ground. Many Greenwood residents listed their destroyed property down to the number: 12 curtains, six pairs of silk socks, one violin. Some individual claims reached well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, adjusted for inflation.

 

But city attorneys and judges opposed offering restitution at every step. In one suit, Harry L.S. Halley, an assistant attorney for the City of Tulsa, denied that any of the city’s police officers were guilty of wrongdoing, even though a state investigation unfolding around the same time identified specific officers as participants. Mr. Halley, I discovered through my research, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; so were at least two local judges.

 

The Klan seized political power across Oklahoma during the era through violence and coercion. It’s no surprise, then, that the Greenwood lawsuits languished in the courts for years as the massacre quietly disappeared from newspaper headlines and local histories. Many of the suits were summarily dismissed on the same day in 1937. But those legal decisions are permanently tainted because of the openly racist context in which they were made.

 

While the lawsuits were stalling out, other levers of government were being used to conspire against Greenwood. For decades, the neighborhood’s schools were denied funding equal to that of their white counterparts. In the 1930s, Greenwood was deemed by the federal government a financially “hazardous” area for banks to issue loans, making it an early redlined neighborhood. Interstate highway construction destroyed parts of the district in 1967; urban renewal claimed much of the rest in the ensuing years. A justice system that had been largely silent on Greenwood’s property claims after the massacre facilitated eminent domain proceedings that made it possible for the government to seize privately owned land.

 

In 2003, Greenwood made another major legal push for restitution. More than 100 massacre survivors and their descendants filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Tulsa, the State of Oklahoma and others. The arguments were similar to those of the original suits — the city had failed to protect its citizens from members of the mob and instead had empowered their calculated destruction. But the defendants insisted that the statute of limitations on filing such lawsuits had long expired. A federal judge ultimately agreed, citing the lawsuits filed by Mr. Franklin and others as evidence that Greenwood residents had already had their shot at restitution. In the warped view of the court, those courageous initial efforts to seek justice in the face of obstinate attorneys, at least one of whom was aligned with the Klan, actually undermined later attempts.

 

The most recent lawsuit was filed in 2020, only a few months after George Floyd’s murder. Damario Solomon-Simmons, a Tulsa native who had served as a law clerk on the legal team for the 2003 suit, helped devise a new approach to reparations by invoking Oklahoma’s obscure public nuisance law. Under the public nuisance framework, a business or government entity can be held liable for actions that endanger the health or safety of a community, so long as the nuisance is ongoing.

 

Mr. Solomon-Simmons and his legal team began connecting the dots on how Greenwood had been harmed not only by the massacre but also by countless forms of systemic racism afterward: job discrimination, urban renewal, community disinvestment. Their sweeping case mirrored nationwide efforts to extend the discussion of reparations for Black Americans beyond slavery to issues such as redlining and overpolicing.

 

In California, a state-appointed task force recently released an 1,100-page report outlining how Black Americans in the state had been robbed of wealth and opportunity for generations. The duty of deciding whether to approve any kind of reparations package will fall to the California Legislature. In Tulsa, Judge Wall recommended that the Greenwood survivors follow a similar route, pursuing justice through the legislative or executive branches. But Oklahoma lawmakers have declined to support reparations bills advocated by state legislators in the past. Leaving the matter to the states, as laws concerning segregation and slavery once were, seems unlikely to yield significant gains for Black people anytime soon.

 

The effort to find a pathway toward reparations for Greenwood continues. At a news conference a few days after the lawsuit’s dismissal, Mr. Solomon-Simmons announced that his legal team was appealing the judge’s decision to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. As a show of defiance, he hoisted an oversize reprint of the photograph of Mr. Franklin sitting in his makeshift tent in the aftermath of the massacre. One of Mr. Franklin’s most penetrating quotes sprang to my mind: “Right is slow and tardy, while wrong is aggressive; that’s the only way it can survive.”

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

4) In Lessons on Slavery, Context Matters

By Jamelle Bouie, July 29, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/opinion/florida-schools-history-slavery.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Opinion

W.E.B. Du Bois, left, and Carter G. Woodson, right. Credit...Universal History Archive/Getty Images, Getty Images

One of the points I tried to make in my Friday column about the new Florida curriculum on the history of slavery is that the context of a statement can have a radical effect on its meaning.

 

To be clear, there are legitimate objections to make to the particular phrasing. As I noted in my piece, to say that “Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” is to make several untenable assumptions about the experiences of most enslaved Africans as well as to occlude the essential quality of life under slavery, which is that neither your person nor your labor were your own.

 

But the basic idea that “slaves developed skills” isn’t an illegitimate one. And although it has been deployed in efforts to minimize the fundamental injustice of American slavery, it has also been used in defense of the essential humanity of the enslaved. For example, at the same time that white supremacist authors were writing slavery apologia for student instruction, scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois were taking note of the skills and agency of enslaved Africans for a very different purpose.

 

“It must not be assumed, however, that the labor of the Negro has been simply the muscle-straining unintelligent work of the lowest grade. On the contrary he has appeared both as personal servant, skilled laborer and inventor. That the Negroes of colonial times were not all ignorant savages is shown by the advertisements concerning them. Continually runaway slaves are described as speaking very good English; sometimes as speaking not only English but Dutch and French. Some could read and write and play musical instruments. Others were blacksmiths, limeburners, bricklayers and cobblers. Others were noted as having considerable sums of money. In the early days in the South the whole conduct of the house was in the hands of the Negro house servant; as butler, cook, nurse, valet and maid, the Negro conducted family life.”

 

Likewise, in his account of colonial slavery, the historian and activist Carter G. Woodson, provides a catalog of “the evidences of mental development of the Negroes of that day.”

 

“In offering slaves for sale and advertising for fugitives, masters spoke of their virtues as well as their shortcomings. Judging from what they said about them in these advertisements, one must conclude that many of the eighteenth century slaves had taken over modern civilization and had made themselves useful and skilled laborers, with a knowledge of the modern languages, the fundamentals of mathematics and science, and acquaintance with some of the professions.”

 

The difference between these accounts and those of the slavery apologists, however, is that Du Bois, Woodson and their contemporaries never implied or suggested that chattel slavery was anything less than a crime. Where apologists dismissed or disparaged the efforts, radical and otherwise, to end slavery, Du Bois, Woodson and others gave them pride of place in their histories and narratives about the peculiar institution. And in the same way that slavery apologia served a specific ideological purpose, the emphasis on the skills and agency of the enslaved by Black scholars was meant to challenge, in Woodson’s famous words, “the mis-education of the Negro.”

 

This is all to say that what might appear to be little more than a semantic dispute is, in actuality, a much more fundamental conflict about what the facts of our history actually mean, not just for the past, but for the present.

 

What I Wrote

 

My Tuesday column was on the group No Labels and the fantasy of politics without partisanship.

 

“For now, though, I want to highlight the fact that there’s no way to realize this long-running fantasy of politics without partisanship. Organized conflict is an unavoidable part of democratically structured political life for the simple reason that politics is about governing and governing is about choices.”

 

My Friday column was, as I was just saying, on the new Florida curriculum on slavery and what the conflict says about historical memory.

 

“You might say that these are minor, semantic differences. But in history the same ideas can be used to very different effect. And it is exactly these questions of wording and emphasis that mark one of the differences between a modern, more truthful depiction of American slavery and an older, tendentious approach that either de-emphasized or ignored outright the basic injustice of human bondage in favor of a gloss that placed a more pleasant sheen on an otherwise horrific institution.”

 

And the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz was on the 1995 film “Strange Days.”

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

5) ‘Oppenheimer’ Fans Are Rediscovering a 40-Year-Old Documentary

“The Day After Trinity,” made available without a subscription until August, shot to the top of the Criterion Channel’s most-watched films.

By Marc Tracy, July 27, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/movies/day-after-trinity-oppenheimer-documentary.html

Decades before the movie “Oppenheimer,” J. Robert Oppenheimer and his work on the atomic bomb were the subject of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “The Day After Trinity.” Credit...via the Criterion Channel

One morning in the 1950s, Jon H. Else’s father pointed toward Nevada from their home in Sacramento. “There was this orange glow that suddenly rose up in the sky, and then shrank back down,” Else recalled.

 

It was, hundreds of miles away, an atomic weapon test: a symbol of the world that was created when a team of Americans led by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb a decade earlier on July 16, 1945.

 

Growing up in the nuclear age left an impression on Else, now 78.

 

He was later a series producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize,” a program on the civil rights movement, and directed documentaries about the Great Depression and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But before all that, in 1981, he made a documentary about Oppenheimer, the scientist whose bony visage graced the covers of midcentury magazines, and the bomb. It was called “The Day After Trinity,” a reference to that inaugural detonation.

 

Decades later, viewers are flocking to Else’s film, a nominee for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, as a companion to Christopher Nolan’s biopic “Oppenheimer,” which grossed more than $100 million domestically in its opening week this month.

 

After the Criterion Channel made “The Day After Trinity” available without a subscription until August, it shot to the top of the streaming service’s most-watched films this month, alongside movies directed by Martin Scorsese, Paul Verhoeven, Michael Mann and other typically Letterboxdcore filmmakers.

 

“We have seen a huge increase in views,” Criterion said in a statement, “and we’re very happy with the success of the strategy as a way to make sure this film found its rightful place in the conversation around ‘Oppenheimer.’”

 

In a phone interview from California last week, Else, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, praised Nolan’s film, which he saw last weekend in San Francisco. (A spokeswoman for Nolan said he was not available to comment.)

 

“These stories have to be retold every generation,” Else said, “and they have to be told by new storytellers.”

 

Nolan’s three-hour opus, a Universal release shot on IMAX film with a lavish cast of brand-name Hollywood actors, shares much with “The Day After Trinity,” an 88-minute documentary financed by the public television station in San Jose, Calif., and various grants.

 

The Oppenheimer of “Oppenheimer” (based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus”), and the Oppenheimer of “The Day After Trinity” are the same brilliant, sensitive, haunted soul. “This man who was apparently a completely nonviolent fellow was the architect of the most savage weapon in history,” Else said.

 

The movies feature some of the same characters from the life of Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, including his brother, Frank (played in “Oppenheimer” by Dylan Arnold), his friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) and the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz). Both films build to Trinity and then document the conflict between some of its inventors’ hope that the bomb would never be used in war and its deployment in Japan, the invention of the more devastating hydrogen bomb and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.

 

A central plot point in each movie is a closed hearing in 1954 at which Oppenheimer was stripped of his government security clearance, partly because of past left-wing associations. David Webb Peoples, a co-editor and co-writer of “The Day After Trinity” — whose later screenwriting credits include “Blade Runner,” “Unforgiven” and “12 Monkeys” — even proposed structuring the film around the hearing, as Nolan did with “Oppenheimer.”

 

“The closest he ever came to an autobiography is his personal statement at the beginning of the hearing,” said Else, who focused on interviews with firsthand witnesses, old footage and still photographs rather than trying to recreate the hearing.

 

“It’s also a courtroom drama,” Else added, “and who is not going to pay attention to a courtroom drama?”

 

One place “The Day After Trinity” goes that “Oppenheimer” does not is Hiroshima. In the documentary, Manhattan Project physicists recount wandering the wrecked Japanese city. The narrator explains that the Allies had not bombed it beforehand to preserve a place to demonstrate the new weapon.

 

Else returned to the topic in his 2007 documentary, “Wonders Are Many: The Making of ‘Doctor Atomic,’” which chronicles the composer John Adams’s opera about Oppenheimer. Else is currently working on a book about nuclear testing. And in 1982, he made a one-hour episode of the public-television series “Nova” about the Exploratorium, the San Francisco science museum that was founded in 1969 by none other than Frank Oppenheimer.

 

“Making ‘The Day After Trinity’ was a pretty rugged ride — it’s pretty rugged subject matter,” Else said. “After I finished it, it was such a joy to spend a year with Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, and celebrate the joy of science.”

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

6) What ‘Oppenheimer’ Doesn’t Tell You About the Trinity Test

By Tina Cordova, July 30, 2023

Ms. Cordova, the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, wrote from Albuquerque.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/international-world/oppenheimer-nuclear-bomb-cancer.html

A sign once carried by a victim of radiation from the 1945 atomic bomb test in New Mexico on display at the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe in 2019. Credit...Robert Alexander/Getty Images

July is a hard month for a lot of us here in New Mexico, where thousands of people’s lives were upended by the test of the world’s first nuclear bomb. The events of July 16, 1945, weigh heavily on us. And why wouldn’t they? They changed everything. The people of New Mexico were the first human test subjects of the world’s most powerful weapon.

 

This July has been more tense than usual, as our community waited for the release of “Oppenheimer” — and some recognition of what we have endured over the last 78 years. When I watched the film at a packed screening in Santa Fe, I saw that wasn’t to be. The three-hour movie tells only part of the story of the Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb, and conducted the test code-named Trinity that day in July. It does not explore in any depth the costs of deciding to test the bomb in a place where my family and many others had lived for generations.

 

One film can’t do it all, but I can’t help feeling that the retelling of this story, as it stands, is a missed opportunity. A new generation of Americans is learning about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, and, like their parents, they won’t hear much about how American leaders knowingly risked and caused harm to the health of their fellow citizens in the name of war. My community and I are being left out of the narrative again.

 

The area of southern New Mexico where the Trinity test occurred was not, contrary to the popular account, an uninhabited, desolate expanse of land. There were more than 13,000 New Mexicans living within a 50-mile radius. Many of those children, women, and men were not warned before or after the test. Eyewitnesses have told me they believed they were experiencing the end of the world. They didn’t reflect on the Bhagavad Gita, as Oppenheimer said he did. Many simply dropped to their knees and recited the Hail Mary in Spanish.

 

For days after, they said, ash fell from the sky, contaminated with 10 pounds of plutonium. A 2010 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that after the test, radiation levels near some homes in the area reached “almost 10,000 times what is currently allowed in public areas.”

 

That fallout has had devastating health consequences. While I know of no one who lost their life during the test, the organization I co-founded has documented many instances of families in New Mexico with four and five generations of cancers since the bomb was detonated. My own family is typical: I am the fourth generation in my family to have had cancer since 1945. My 23-year-old niece has just been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She is a college student studying art. Now her life, too, has been upended.

 

Despite this, New Mexicans who may have been exposed to radioactive fallout from Trinity have never been eligible for compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, a 1990 federal law that has provided billions to people exposed during subsequent tests on U.S. soil or during uranium mining.

 

“Oppenheimer” leaves out other stories, too. The Manhattan Project and the nuclear weapons industry used the promise of a better life to entice thousands of people in the Southwest into the uranium mines that supplied the Manhattan Project. The miners went to work each day without adequate safety gear, while supervisors wore it from head to toe. Miners seldom left the mines during their shifts, even to eat lunch. They drank the contaminated water inside the mines when they were allowed to take breaks.

 

Many of the farmers of the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico, after being displaced through eminent domain so that the Los Alamos laboratory could be built, were bused up the mountain to the lab site to do the dirtiest jobs, including building the roads, the bridges, the facilities. When those were complete, many were given new jobs at the lab, including janitorial work. Their wives and other Hispanic and Native American women were enlisted as domestic workers who cleaned the houses, cooked the meals, filled the baby bottles, and changed the diapers in the remote compound while the bomb was being developed.

 

Their sacrifices are still part of our lives today. I wept during the scenes in the film leading up to the detonation and during the test itself. I could hardly breathe, my heart was beating so fast. I thought about my dad, who was 4 years old that day. His town, Tularosa, was idyllic back then. After the test, after radioactive ash covered his home, he carried on as he always had drinking fresh milk, eating fresh fruit and vegetables that grew in the contaminated soil. By age 64, he had developed three cancers that he didn’t have risk factors for, two of which were primary oral cancers. He died at the age of 71.

 

“Oppenheimer” portrays the scientist as the flawed man that he was. But the film doubles down on the silence we’ve been living with for eight decades about the loss of life and health that was a consequence of the development and testing of the atomic bomb. While the families in my community continue their wait for some wider recognition of what they endured — including coverage by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act — we are left with a film that declines to bear witness to our truth.

 

This, too, is the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the government he worked for. I will never be able to forgive them for wrecking our lives and walking away.

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

7) Phoenix’s Month in Hell: 31 Days of Extreme Heat Tests the City

A continuous stretch of days reaching or exceeding 110 degrees has filled emergency rooms and even withered the mighty saguaro cactus.

By Jack Healy, July 31, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/us/phoenixs-month-in-hell-31-days-of-extreme-heat-tests-the-city.html

A billboard displayed the temperature on July 18th. Phoenix smashed through another record last week, racking up the most 115-degree days ever in a calendar year. Credit...Ash Ponders for The New York Times

Patients with heat stroke and burns from the asphalt are swamping hospitals. Air-conditioners are breaking down at homeless shelters. The medical examiner’s office is deploying trailer-sized coolers to store bodies, for the first time since the early days of Covid.

 

For 31 straight days — from the last day of June through Sunday, the second-to-last day of July — Phoenix has hit at least 110 degrees, not merely breaking its 18-day record in 1974, but setting a significant new one. The city smashed through another record last week, racking up the most 115-degree days ever in a calendar year, part of a global heat wave that made July Earth’s hottest month on record.

 

This has been Phoenix’s July in hell — an entire month of merciless heat that has ground down people’s health and patience in the city of 1.6 million, while also straining a regionwide campaign to protect homeless people and older residents who are most vulnerable.

 

“I’m so sick of this,” Rae Hicks, 45, said this past week as she sat with her 7-year-old son on the floor of a clammy cooling center in Tempe, their suitcases clustered around them.

 

It was 118 degrees outside, and they had nowhere to stay after the center closed down that evening, like thousands of other people around Phoenix left homeless by rising rents and a resurgence of evictions. The record heat has made their summer a desperate game of survival — bouncing between libraries, supermarkets and relief centers during the day, and sleeping in motels, cars or shelter beds at night to avoid the scorching streets.

 

With at least two more hot months ahead, some residents said they did not know how much more they could take.

 

“It’s wearing on people,” said Kevin Conboy, a physician assistant with Circle the City, a medical charity that treats homeless people across Phoenix. “Everyone’s temperatures are hovering at 100. Everyone. is complaining of feeling so fatigued, and tired.”

 

Even the group’s mobile medical buses are succumbing to the heat, forcing them out of service to get repaired.

 

The medical examiner in Phoenix has reported 25 heat-related deaths this year, and said it is also investigating an additional 249 deaths for ties to heat. There were a record-breaking 425 heat-related deaths last year across Maricopa County.

 

Hospitals around Phoenix also say they treated more people for heat ailments and burns in July compared with previous summers, infusing them with cold saline or packing them into ice-filled body bags that sometimes leak and cause nurses to slip in icy puddles.

 

“We are very full,” said Dr. Kara Geren, an emergency-medicine doctor at Valleywise Health Medical Center in central Phoenix. “We have everything from heat cramps to heat stroke and death.”

 

Dr. Geren said the emergency department was treating more homeless patients and drug users with heat-related illnesses this summer, as well more people who burn their legs and backs by falling on pavement that can heat up to 180 degrees. This week, a woman in her 80s came to the hospital for burn treatment after falling outside her home, then lying on the searing pavement for two hours before anyone heard her calls for help.

 

Towering saguaro cactuses are collapsing from the heat, and the agaves, creosote bushes and stubby barrel cactuses that spangle highways are turning yellow. Hiking trails have been closed at midday for more than a month to protect hikers (and the paramedics who have to rescue them).

Even the local news media seemed to hit a breaking point this past week, when the Arizona Republic cried out: “Will the inferno never end?”

 

Austin Davis, who runs a tiny homeless-outreach charity called AZ Hugs, spends his days trying to answer calls from unsheltered people desperate to avoid sleeping out in the heat.

 

“I can’t tell you how many people called me crying, asking for a hotel room, saying, I can’t make it through another day like this,” he said.

 

Many of Phoenix’s shelters are full, and waiting lists for publicly funded housing are weeks or months long, families said in interviews. They find Mr. Davis’s number scrawled on whiteboards at cooling centers, get it from shelter employees or other people on the street, and call in a last bid for help. On Thursday afternoon, he had 268 unread text messages.

 

“My family is sleeping in the park right now myself my husband and our 7 children,” read one. Mr. Davis responded by asking for birth dates, income levels and other information he would need to start connecting them with housing and shelter programs and signed off with two heart emojis.

 

Another call came from Melissa Duckett, 40, who had been sleeping in her car with her wife and their 11-year-old son since being evicted in the spring. Ms. Duckett said they had been in a subsidized apartment, but had fallen behind on the rent when she got sick.

 

When the heat waves first started to bake central Phoenix in late June, they had talked about driving up to Flagstaff, where it was cooler. Then their car died in the heat. Their new respite was a trailer that Mr. Davis had fitted out with bunk beds and a working air-conditioner as an emergency stopgap for families.

 

“We’re just going to be happy to be out of the heat,” Ms. Duckett said.

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

8) Homeless Camps Are Being Cleared in California. What Happens Next?

One of the state’s largest homeless encampments was recently shut down in Oakland, but that didn’t stop the problem of homelessness.

By Livia Albeck-Ripka, July 30, 202

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/us/homeless-camp-oakland-california.html

A sign hanging inside Mr. Janosko’s former home in the Wood Street encampment. Credit...Lauren Segal for The New York Times

John Janosko recently moved into a tiny cabin in Oakland, Calif., after the city and the state shut down the sprawling homeless encampment where he had resided for most of the past eight years. City officials consider the shed-size unit — with a bed, a folding chair, a desk and a mini fridge — a vast improvement over the makeshift shelters that once sat beneath a freeway.

 

That’s not how Mr. Janosko sees it.

 

He says he does not have keys to the free cabin that the city has temporarily assigned him. Nor is he allowed visitors. He had to get rid of most of his belongings and says he has barely slept there.

 

“It’s not my home,” said Mr. Janosko, 54, who lost his job as a chef, and then his apartment, about a decade ago. “My home was down the street.”

 

He lived in a structure of recycled wood and corrugated iron attached to a trailer, ensconced in a thicket of other such structures and vehicles. Stretching several blocks in West Oakland, the Wood Street encampment became a community for those who had little else. More than 200 people lived there until California leaders — and Gov. Gavin Newsom in particular — decided last year to clear the camp because of its hazardous debris and fires.

 

The evictions have brought into sharp relief one of the most intractable challenges for American cities, particularly those in California. As homelessness has surged, more people have congregated in large encampments for some semblance of security and stability. But such sites are often unsanitary and dangerous, exhausting neighbors and the owners of nearby businesses.

 

What happens after the closure of Wood Street and other camps in California will serve as the latest test of how effectively the state is addressing homelessness. Nearly half of the nation’s unsheltered population — those who sleep on the streets, in tents, in cars or in other places not intended for human habitation — resides in California, according to last year’s federal tally of homelessness. The state makes up about 12 percent of the country’s overall population.

 

In California, Democratic leaders who previously tolerated homeless camps have lost their patience for the tent villages and blocks of trailers that proliferated during the pandemic.

 

Governor Newsom has helped clear homeless camps himself and has told mayors he was trying to set an example. San Diego recently banned encampments on public property. And Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, has moved more than 14,000 homeless people into temporary housing since taking office in December, her office said last month.

 

In Oakland, those in desperate need of housing began moving to Wood Street nearly a decade ago, finding it a welcome refuge on the western edge of the city. Former residents said they had been sent there by the local authorities, who promised to leave them alone.

 

Soon, the encampment mushroomed into one of the state’s largest. Residents installed solar panels, hot-water showers, a community garden, a kitchen, a clothing closet and, with help from community volunteers, tiny homes. Some traded goods and electronics; others did each other’s hair and nails. They had Christmas and birthday parties.

 

Some also took drugs together, and when campers overdosed, their neighbors tried to help them, former residents said. There also were thefts, shootings and, according to the California Department of Transportation, which owns a portion of the land, more than 200 fires, including one that turned fatal.

 

Last year, Governor Newsom had seen enough. Despite protests by Wood Street residents and after a prolonged legal battle, the state Transportation Department eventually began evicting people last fall, citing the “serious safety risks.” This spring, city officials forced out the remaining 70 residents.

 

All told, 95 people accepted offers of shelter from either Alameda County or the City of Oakland, according to the Transportation Department. Dozens of them went to community cabins and an R.V. camp run by the city. A handful of others set up new camps on public property near the Wood Street site.

 

Some, like Mr. Janosko, spend their days somewhere in between. Many don’t want another way station, and the temporary housing often comes with a six-month time limit. Others are reluctant to part with their belongings, as well as their community; they say that encampments provide them with both physical and emotional security, especially as a record number of homeless people die on America’s streets.

 

Outside the former encampment, displaced residents relocated a gazebo as a gathering point that they call the Wood Street Commons. There, they hold meetings with lawyers, and volunteers drop off sandwiches, medicine and clothes.

 

LeaJay Harper, 40, became homeless around a decade ago after losing her job at a nonprofit group. After the closure of Wood Street, she was living in her trailer in an R.V. camp about seven miles southeast. But she kept coming back.

 

“I started hanging out on Wood Street again,” she said, “just so I could be around people that love me.”

 

Community cabins and safe camping sites usually provide only temporary shelter, falling short of the permanent housing that is considered ideal. But they seem to be the best that California can do, with a severe housing shortage and high costs. Despite the state’s spending of more than $30 billion since 2019 on housing-related programs, the homeless population there has continued to grow.

 

“This is a very difficult population to serve, with very complex needs. And if we can bring someone inside even for a little bit, that’s a victory for that person,” said Jason Elliott, the deputy chief of staff for Governor Newsom. “We may not have permanent housing stick the first time, or the fourth time or the fifth time, but we’re going to keep trying.”

 

According to a September audit of Oakland’s homelessness services, close to half of the people housed in community cabins ended up back on the street in the 2020-21 fiscal year.

 

While temporary shelter may be better than nothing, it doesn’t solve the root problems, said Barbara DiPietro, the senior policy director for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. She noted that, sometimes, people would rather stay on the street because shelters were often so restrictive and, in some cases, unsafe.

 

“It’s like having a significant wound and being offered a Band-Aid,” she said. “Shelters are not home.”

 

But California leaders are under immense pressure to move people off the street, somehow, some way. A poll conducted in January found that 76 percent of likely voters said homelessness was a big problem in their part of the state.

 

In Oakland, residents living near Wood Street filed hundreds of complaints about the encampment, citing illegal dumping and people living in their vehicles. Some neighbors said the camp’s closure was long overdue.

 

“There was a community of people, but it was dangerous, it was dirty,” said Brandon Braunstein, a software engineer who lives near Wood Street and was walking his two dogs on a recent morning. “It wasn’t a safe environment for the neighborhood or for, in my opinion, the people that lived there.”

 

Still, Mr. Braunstein and other neighbors said they also worried about what would become of the encampment’s former residents and whether they would find a better place to live.

 

At the Wood Street Commons, a small group of former residents recently gathered to figure out how to reassemble their fragmented world. Some had shelter, others were still making do on the streets. All longed to maintain the community they once had.

 

But as they sat beneath the canopy, a city contractor in a down jacket approached and told them that it might eventually have to come down.

“It’s frustrating,” Mr. Janosko responded. “Where does the city think that people are going to go?”

 

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

9) Driver Plows Car Into Migrant Workers in ‘Intentional Assault,’ Police Say

The vehicle cut over a median and toward where the six workers were standing outside a Walmart in Lincolnton, N.C., the police said. The authorities were looking for the driver.

By Livia Albeck-Ripka, July 31, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/us/migrant-workers-lincolnton-crash.html

All six of the workers struck in Lincolnton, N.C., were transported to Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, according to the police. Credit...Lincolnton Police Department

A man driving an S.U.V. plowed into a group of six migrant workers outside a Walmart in Lincolnton, N.C., on Sunday in an “intentional assault,” the police said.

 

The attack took place just after 1:15 p.m., when the man, who was behind the wheel of a midsize black S.U.V. with a luggage rack, steered toward the group, according to a statement released on Sunday evening by the Lincolnton Police Department. The episode was caught on video, and the department was asking the public for help in identifying the vehicle or the driver.

 

All six of the workers were transported to Atrium Health Lincoln with “various injuries” that were not life-threatening, the police said.

 

“None is in critical condition,” Maj. Brian R. Greene of the Lincolnton Police Department said by telephone. The police have reviewed the footage, he added, which appears to show the driver cutting over a median and into a grassy area between parking spaces, where the migrants were standing.

 

They were outside the Walmart in northeast Lincolnton, a city of less than 12,000 people about 30 miles northwest of Charlotte.

 

The police interviewed all of the migrants, Major Greene said, and they had no apparent connection with the driver of the vehicle. “We’re trying to locate the individual that did this,” he added. “Right now, we don’t have a lot.”

 

The attack follows a deadly crash in May in which the driver of a Range Rover barreled into a crowd of migrants in Brownsville, Texas, killing eight of them. That driver was arrested and charged with manslaughter and other charges.

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

10) Putin’s Crackdown Leaves Transgender Russians Bracing for Worse

A new law underscores how Vladimir V. Putin is increasingly using the war in Ukraine as justification for greater restrictions on L.G.B.T.Q. life, portraying it as a consequence of deviant Western values.

By Neil MacFarquhar and Georgy Birger, Aug. 1, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/world/europe/russia-transgender-ban.html

Jan Dvorkin posing for a portrait in an undated photo. Credit...via Jan Dvorkin

Jan Dvorkin had raised and nurtured his adopted son in Moscow for seven years until, one day in May, the Russian authorities notified him they were revoking custody. A woman Mr. Dvorkin knew had filed an official complaint, saying that because he was transgender and gay, he was an unfit parent.

 

When Mr. Dvorkin asked the woman why she had reported him, she told him he had brought it on himself, and “that I could have easily avoided it by staying in the closet.”

 

He managed to find another family to take the boy, who is deaf, so that the child would not be sent to an orphanage.

 

Mr. Dvorkin’s experience underscores the increasingly repressive treatment gay and transgender people are subjected to across Russia — a hardship that seems certain to grow as the government leverages the war in Ukraine as justification for greater restrictions on L.G.B.T.Q. life.

 

The latest crackdown came last week when President Vladimir V. Putin signed a law that criminalized all surgery and hormone treatments used for gender transitions.

 

That law comes on top of a measure enacted last December prohibiting the representation of L.G.B.T.Q. relationships in any media — streaming services, social platforms, books, music, posters, billboards and film.

 

Critics, including legal and medical professionals and gay rights activists, view the campaign as an effort to distract from Russia’s military failings in Ukraine — by creating a boogeyman it can portray as a threat from a deviant and corrupt West.

 

“It is a common practice to look for internal enemies when their external enemy turns out to be tougher than expected,” Mr. Dvorkin, 32, said in an interview from Moscow. “With no success on the front line, Putin found an easy enemy, a vulnerable group whom he can defeat in Russia.”

 

As with many repressive measures, Mr. Putin himself seemed to have inspired the law.

 

Long before his invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin had scorned the idea of gay rights. But as his military stumbled, he began to rewrite the war as a Western attempt to undermine Russian security and “traditional values.”

 

He took aim at questions of gender identity as well as sexual orientation, regularly denigrated transgender people in his speeches, mocking the idea of “Parent No. 1 and Parent No. 2” instead of “mom and dad,” and suggested that the West sought to make the world adopt “dozens of genders.”

 

The new law bans all gender transitions as well as changing genders on official documents like passports. It became harsher as it proceeded in Russia’s Parliament; typically a rubber stamp for Mr. Putin’s favored legislation, it overwhelmingly passed the law. The final version annuls marriages when one spouse changes gender and bans adoptions by such couples.

 

The law essentially removes the ability of transgender people to control their own bodies, rights activists said, and even if people had the means to travel abroad seeking surgery, which many do not, they would not be allowed to update official documents. Having the wrong gender on identification papers would create hurdles in countless aspects of life such as employment and travel.

 

The new law also bans treatment with either estrogen or testosterone, which are typically taken before undergoing transition surgery. There are limited exceptions for people who had started the process and already changed documents.

 

Critics said the ban could lead to what is essentially a black market for the drugs. One transgender person in St. Petersburg said that a clandestine lab there was already attempting to make estrogen from over-the-counter drugs. Illicit testosterone was a bigger challenge, said the person, who insisted on anonymity to avoid retribution.

 

Surveys by the independent pollster Levada show that, over the last decade, the Kremlin’s propaganda campaign against the L.G.B.T.Q. community may have affected Russian attitudes: The percentage of respondents who said they viewed gay people with disgust or fear increased from 26 percent in 2013 to 38 percent in 2021.

 

In 2013, the first Russian law against disseminating “gay propaganda” was framed as protecting children. This time, with the war as a backdrop, the law banning gender transition was presented as a matter of national security.

 

“The war is not only on the front line, the war is going on in the minds and souls, and we want to protect our country from being destroyed from within,” Pyotr Tolstoy, a hard-line deputy speaker of Parliament, wrote on Telegram.

 

The concept of national security has become an increasingly fluid one, said Max Olenichev, a lawyer who defends  L.G.B.T. people. “It has become an ephemeral thing that can mean absolutely anything,” he said. “Whenever you do not want to give a reason, just say ‘national security.’”

 

The law also corresponds with Mr. Putin’s attempt to portray Russia as a bastion of what he calls “traditional family values,” a longstanding effort to appeal to conservative voters at home and abroad.

 

The hope is that support for his social agenda will extend to endorsing the war, said Alexander Kondakov, a sociologist at University College Dublin. “By targeting a group that is already marginalized, they amass support for the war and any other cause that the government wants,” he said.

 

For the L.G.B.T. Q. community, the law was yet another blow.

 

Mr. Dvorkin described the mood among transgender people as “dark and depressing,” with members bracing for more hate crimes. “There was already an increase in vocal hate groups, and since the law passed they have gone off the rails,” he said.

 

Violence against gay people surged after the 2013 law, said Mr. Kondakov, who studies the intersection of law and security for the L.G.B.T. community. Prosecutions  also jumped after the stricter version passed last December, according to a report by Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent newspaper.

 

Mr. Dvorkin, who began transitioning at 28, is the founder of Center T,  which offers medical and other advice to thousands of transgender people. The government recently designated the organization a “foreign agent,” a label whose onerous requirements carry an automatic stigma, and he fears it will soon have to shutter or go underground.

 

Mr. Dvorkin began looking for a new home for his son not long after the stricter law passed last December. Repeated warnings from the children’s services office, which supervised the adoption, against discussing his gender identity and sexual orientation online, as well as a court-imposed fine, signaled that his custody was in jeopardy.

 

His son, now 10, also had a kidney disease. In June, Mr. Dvorkin struggled to locate a family willing to take him. He finally persuaded one to do so, then managed to convince officials not to return him to an orphanage.

 

Use of hormones and surgery for transgender people was first accepted in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and by 2017 Russia had developed what many considered a rational approach, leaving the decision up to a panel of doctors and psychiatrists.

 

Gender transition had not been much of a political issue in Russia until now. Initially, the Ministry of Health questioned the need for any change, but it soon surrendered to browbeating by Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Parliament, who accused  officials of pursing an American agenda by seeking to emulate “Sodom.”

 

Although overall numbers are not readily available, Mr. Volodin said that  2,700 people had currently been approved for gender transitions by the ministry; the source of the number was unclear. Russia’s population is more than 143 million.

 

In St. Petersburg, the person who described the clandestine lab, who uses the pronoun they, rushed to finish the process of being legally recognized as a woman before the law took effect. Describing it as “anarchistic escapism,” they said they invented a new, unusual first name whose spelling looks like someone smashed a keyboard with a fist. They said they assured the bureaucrat reading the application it was a traditional Siberian name.

 

“The best thing we can do is to resist this state by simply existing,” they said.

 

Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*