Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, August 25, 2023

        

Join the March to End Fossil Fuels!

September 17th, 1-4:00 P.M., NYC and Everywhere!

Register an Action Anywhere:

https://fightfossilfuels.net/#act

 

On September 17th, People Vs. Fossil Fuels—a broad coalition of over 1,200 climate and environmental justice groups, is planning a massive demonstration during the United Nations Climate Action Summit.

 

"The United Nations is calling on world leaders to take real steps to lead us off fossil fuels to protect people and the planet. On September 20th in New York, the UN Climate Ambition Summit will gather world leaders to commit to phasing out fossil fuels."Thousands of us will take to the streets before the summit to demand President Biden take bold action to end fossil fuels. Other direct actions are being planned all week in the lead up to the march and across the country!

 

Sign Up:

 https://actionnetwork.org/forms/march-end-fossil-fuels?referrer=group-beyond-extreme-

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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

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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. 

 

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!

 

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.

 

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!

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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 

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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

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  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

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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.

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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

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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)

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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

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Sign the petition:

https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/

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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

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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]

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[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

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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

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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!

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AMERIKA THE LIE (2023)

By Kevin ''Rashid'' Johnson

Everything in Amerika is inverted

Every ideal it professes perverted

Take for example the name department of defense

Which makes absolutely no sense

Its only role invasions

and infiltrations of weaker nations

And the department of justice

Targets just us

The poor, powerless and people of color

But protects those wealthy others

Who commit the real crimes

And undermine

World peace and stability

Because they have the ability

And exercise it

Killing and robbing multitudes but few realize it

Because the system shields

The power they wield

Through corporate monopolies

But call it a free market society

Promoting deporting huge portions

Of marginalized groups while opposing abortions

And birth control

Assuming the role

Of policing women's bodies

While claiming it's a free society

And the lie of an economy that trickles down

But grinds the poor and workers into the ground

While the rich few are exempt from taxation

And drive up the cost of living with inflation

With cops who swear to serve and protect us

But only kill maim and disrespect us

Everything about Amerika is inverted

Every value it claims to uphold perverted

With euphemisms its rulers disguise

A society sustained by lies

Like the claimed land of the free and home of the brave

But steeped in racism and built by slaves

Write to Kevin “Rashid” Johnson:

Kevin Johnson #1007485

Sussex 1 State Prison                                  

24414 Musselwhite Drive

Waverly, VA 23891

Visit Rashid’s website at:

www.rashidmod.com

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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

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Articles

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1) Man Guilty in Attack on Black Lives Matter Protest With Claw and Car

Frank Cavalluzzi, wearing a glove fitted with serrated blades, accosted a peaceful group of demonstrators in Whitestone, Queens, in June 2020.

By Ed Shanahan, Aug. 21, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/nyregion/claw-attack-blm-protest-nyc-guilty.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=New%20York

Frank Cavalluzzi confronted a group of protesters in Queens three years ago with a weapon resembling something from a horror movie. Credit...via Queens County District Attorney's Office

A Queens man who menaced a peaceful group of Black Lives Matter protesters with a bladed glove and then drove his car at them faces a long prison term after being convicted on nine attempted murder counts and other charges, officials said on Monday.

 

The man, Frank Cavalluzzi, was found guilty after a two-week jury trial, Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, said in a statement.

 

Mr. Cavalluzzi, 57, of Flushing, is to be sentenced in October. He faces up to 25 years in prison on each of the attempted murder counts, officials said.

 

“A dangerous man is going to jail,” Ms. Katz said. “It’s a good day for New York and the First Amendment.”

 

Mr. Cavalluzzi’s lawyer, Michael D. Horn, attributed his client’s behavior during the June 2020 episode to mental illness and to what Mr. Horn described as Mr. Cavalluzzi’s uneasiness over the present state of New York City.

 

“The world will see this case” as “about politics,” Mr. Horn said. “But I see it as a single man, with mental health challenges, struggling to understand the evolving city where he lives.”

 

The confrontation for which Mr. Cavalluzzi was charged occurred as people took to the streets in New York and other U.S. cities to protest police abuses and systemic racism following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.

 

The demonstrations, largely peaceful, continued for weeks, and the number of drivers plowing into protesters multiplied. The New York Times reported in July 2020 that there had been 66 such attacks in the roughly six weeks after the killing of Mr. Floyd.

 

On June 2, 2020, a week after Mr. Floyd was killed, Mr. Cavalluzzi was driving his S.U.V. in the Queens neighborhood of Whitestone when he came upon protesters at an intersection where they had hung signs supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, court documents show.

 

Mr. Cavalluzzi stopped his vehicle across the street and began screaming profanities and racial slurs at them, court documents show. “You are in the wrong neighborhood,” was among the things he said, according to court documents.

 

Suddenly, prosecutors said, he made a U-turn and got out of the S.U.V. with a bizarre accouterment on his right arm: a leather glove with four serrated blades attached to it, resembling something from a horror movie. He chased several of the demonstrators while waving the bladed glove, prosecutors said.

 

He then got back in his vehicle and yelled, “I will kill you,” prosecutors said. At that point, he drove onto the sidewalk and toward the demonstrators, who scattered to avoid being hit.

 

Lorraine McShea, 22, was among those whom Mr. Cavalluzzi attacked in what she described in an interview as an “extremely scary” episode. She said she was pleased with the verdict.

 

Ms. McShea, who was at the protest with her brother and sister, said that she knew that some local people were opposed to the protesters, but she was surprised that the confrontation with Mr. Cavalluzzi had escalated so violently.

 

Most upsetting, she said, was not knowing whether her siblings were safe in the moments right after she darted away from Mr. Cavalluzzi’s oncoming vehicle.

 

“I didn’t know if they were dead or alive,” she said.

 

Ms. McShea’s brother, Donald, 19, also welcomed the verdict. The Whitestone protest was his first such demonstration, and he said he was “shocked” by the way it unfolded.

 

As for Mr. Cavalluzzi’s bladed glove, Mr. McShea said it “was really crazy.”

 

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said.

 

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

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2) Can Shrinking Be Good for Japan? A Marxist Best Seller Makes the Case.

Kohei Saito says the country should seize this moment of demographic and economic challenge to reinvent itself through “degrowth communism.”

By Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno, Aug. 23, 2023

Reporting from Tokyo

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/business/kohei-saito-degrowth-communism.html

Kohei Saito’s book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold more than 500,000 copies, exceeding his wildest imaginings. Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. Economic growth is gospel.

 

So a book arguing that Japan should view its current condition of population decline and economic stagnation not as a crisis, but as an opportunity for Marxist reinvention, sounded like a tough sell.

 

But sell it has. Since its release in 2020, Mr. Saito’s book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold more than 500,000 copies, exceeding his wildest imaginings. Mr. Saito, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo, appears regularly in Japanese media to discuss his ideas. His book has been translated into several languages, with an English edition to be issued early next year.

 

Mr. Saito has tapped into what he describes as a growing disillusionment in Japan with capitalism’s ability to solve the problems people see around them, whether caring for the country’s growing older population, stemming rising inequality or mitigating climate change.

 

Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, has worked for years to promote economic growth in the shadow of an aging, shrinking population, with a monetary and fiscal policy that is among the most aggressive of any nation.

 

But there are strong indications that the country’s growth-oriented policies of ultracheap money and big government spending are reaching their limits. The interventions have done little to stimulate growth in Japan’s economy. And as government efforts to lift the birthrate also falter, with fewer people doing less work, “the room for growth is running out,” Mr. Saito, 36, said during a recent interview at his Tokyo home.

 

That’s seemingly true even when Japan’s economy expands. When the country reported growth of 6 percent in the second quarter of this year, it was driven almost entirely by external factors: exports and inbound tourism. Domestic consumption, on the other hand, shrank.

 

The focus on growth was important when Japan was developing. But now that the country is wealthy, Mr. Saito said, the insistence on an endlessly expanding economy, described in terms of gross domestic product, or G.D.P., has produced obviously wasteful spending as the government has urged people to consume more.

 

Some areas of the economy, such as health care, will need to continue growing, but “there are too many cars, too many skyscrapers, too many convenience stores, too much fast fashion,” he said. The focus on consumption, he argues, has had devastating consequences for the environment, driven widening inequality and wasted limited resources that could be put to better use.

 

Reorienting Japan toward goals that more effectively reflect the country’s current needs, he says, would mean using metrics other than G.D.P. to gauge the country’s economic well-being. The focus would shift from quantity to quality, on measures like health, education and standard of living.

 

Mr. Saito first encountered Marx in 2005, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Tokyo. In high school, Mr. Saito was “more right wing,” he said, convinced that individual failings were the root cause of Japan’s problems. When he encountered the German philosopher’s arguments that structural causes led to inequality and war, it was “shocking,” he said.

 

“After the economic crisis of 2008, there was a Marx renaissance in Japan, and I was convinced of the importance of his theory,” Mr. Saito said.

 

He has spent the years since studying Marx’s twilight years, when, Mr. Saito argues, the philosopher realized that capitalism, with its insatiable demand for growth, would inevitably lead to environmental disaster.

 

Mr. Saito conceived “Capital in the Anthropocene” — a reference to an era in which human activity has a profound impact on the Earth’s environment — early in the Covid pandemic. Socialism was a hot topic in Europe and the United States, where politicians like Bernie Sanders urged Americans to grapple with the drawbacks of U.S.-style capitalism. The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, rising inequality and the unavoidable realities of climate change were driving many young people to question the sustainability and fairness of existing economic systems.

 

People in Japan, too, felt dissatisfied with the status quo, Mr. Saito said. But unlike people in other parts of the world, “they aren’t thinking, ‘Capitalism is bad,’ they’re thinking, ‘I’m bad.’ They aren’t thinking that capitalism needs to change, they’re thinking, ‘I need to change.’”

 

He recognized the thinking as similar to his own in high school, when he believed that people merely needed to work harder or be more productive.

 

Mr. Saito’s critics have called him out for castigating the capitalist system he himself has benefited from while providing little more than unworkable idealism and failed ideology as an alternative. His book has ignited a publishing boomlet on Marxism in Japan, with some works attacking his ideas and others supporting them.

 

The renewed discussion hasn’t done much to revive the prospects of Japan’s own Communist Party, however. Mr. Saito is not a fan of the group, which he sees as well-meaning but stale. He also does not have much patience for other more familiar strains of communism, such as that practiced by the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, with their emphasis on state power over industry and centralized planning.

 

He recognizes that growth remains crucial for improving quality of life in less developed countries. And even in rich nations, he does not call for people to give up their creature comforts. He recently moved into a three-story home in an upscale neighborhood on the outskirts of Tokyo and drives a compact Toyota. One of the few things he has given up, he said, is fast food.

 

Achieving degrowth communism, he believes, is less about personal choices and more about changing overarching political and economic structures. Marxism, he argues, offers a viable model for reorienting society around the maximization of public goods as opposed to the endless pursuit and concentration of wealth.

 

That would require, among other things, moving away from G.D.P. as the key measure of a country’s health. As an alternative, he suggests the “human development index,” an idea proposed by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, which the United Nations has used as an alternative indicator of a country’s progress.

 

The index — which measures life expectancy, education and quality of life — gives a more comprehensive view of how the economy affects people’s lives than G.D.P.

 

Mr. Saito is not clear exactly what shape a world under degrowth communism would take, but he insists that it would be democratic and focused on expanding communal resources, reducing the wealth gap and removing incentives for excess consumption.

 

For his own part, he is participating in a handful of projects aimed at promoting those ideas. He and a group of supporters are purchasing land in the mountains west of Tokyo, which they plan to run as a collective to benefit the local community.

 

And for the last year, he has spent time on an organic farm outside Tokyo that has positioned itself less as a business and more as a community resource for urbanites to get healthy food and learn about agriculture.

 

The farm itself is, in one sense, a glimpse of a post-growth Japan where a shrinking population finds itself left with an abundance of resources. The fields are pieced together from properties that went fallow after their owners died or got too old to manage them.

 

It’s the kind of scene that, Mr. Saito’s critics argue, could be common across a Japan under degrowth policies.

 

But he has never really believed that society needs to return to some idyllic, agrarian lifestyle.

 

“I’m not saying let’s go back to the Edo period,” he said, referring to the feudal era when the country was largely closed to the rest of the world.

 

His vision for the future is one in which people — less consumed by their endless pursuit of growth for growth’s sake — have the leisure time to spend a workday pursuing new interests, as he does with farming.

 

On a recent day, Mr. Saito spent several hours working alongside the organic farm’s owners, Shoko Nakano and her husband, Sho Nakano. Local residents popped in to buy vegetables from a shack built out of recycled materials, while an enormous sow snuffled in the heather beside a vegetable garden.

 

After Mr. Saito spent a few hours driving bamboo stakes into a field with a heavy wooden mallet, Ms. Nakano asked him if he felt energized by his experience wielding a symbol of the proletariat.

 

Mr. Saito laughed. “I’m definitely bourgeois,” he said.

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3) How Hip-Hop Became America’s Poetry

By John McWhorter, Aug. 22, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/opinion/hip-hop-anniversary-poetry.html

PABLO DELCÁN

This month, America celebrates the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. Most of the country first encountered this musical revolution with the release of the national hit “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. But it all started six years earlier, on Aug. 11, 1973: An energy crisis was looming, Lucille Ball was about to enter her final season of “Here’s Lucy,” and DJ Kool Herc pioneered rapping over turntable beats in a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.

 

But America is celebrating more than just a musical form. It’s celebrating the moment when rap gave America back its poetry.

 

In 1991, Dana Gioia’s renowned essay “Can Poetry Matter?” made a powerful case that poetry had entered an eclipse, from a staple of our national culture to a boutique concern cherished by a rarefied few. “The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past 30 years,” Gioia wrote, “has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation.” I recall reading the article eagerly in my graduate student days and feeling almost validated: “So that’s why I don’t really like poetry — I was born too late!”

 

Gioia was on to something. For most of our national history, schoolchildren memorized poetry and eventually became grandparents able to recite long passages of verse. Even Bugs Bunny pitched in, lolling alongside a river reading a parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” in one of his first cartoon appearances in 1941. There were celebrity poets who were real celebrities. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems, even with their elevated vocabulary, were cherished by young women the way the lyrics of Alanis Morissette would later be; Millay even had a national radio show for a spell. As late as the 1960s, Marianne Moore appeared on the “Tonight” Show. (Amanda Gorman’s star status as a poet since reading at the inauguration of President Biden is the exception that proves the rule.)

 

You could barely escape poetry back in the day. Newspapers commissioned bits of doggerel to print between columns. The N.A.A.C.P.’s doughty house organ and beacon to Black America, “The Crisis,” edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, included poetry of varying degrees of quality between its articles. A cultivated person often at least pretended to like poetry and had a volume or two on her bookshelf. (My mother did like it, and retained a copy of one of Louis Untermeyer’s grand old anthologies from her early adulthood.)

 

But fast-forward to what Gioia was referring to. As a kid in the 1970s, even one attending private schools, I was directed to drive by poetry slowly now and then, but rarely to actually stop and take it in deeply. Many Russians can recite some Pushkin by heart; I have never known a single poem by heart. As I put it in a book once, poetry is the marjoram on my spice rack: It’s nice to know it’s there, but I use it for only one dish, lamb chops. And I am hardly alone in this among educated Americans of Generation X and beyond.

 

A decade after his 1991 essay, Gioia saw signs of a poetry revival. But I suspect it only felt that way to poets. He wrote that he was hearing more poetry on the radio and seeing more of it online. Apparently, there were more poetry festivals than before. But as a literate person who had always wished poetry might grab him somehow, someday, I felt no new incursion, no sense that to skip it would be like missing the films “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” this summer. I submit that in 2002, poetry was still literary marjoram for most people.

 

But that depended on what you called poetry.

 

Gioia’s essay was justly a classic of its era. But it was also based on a white perspective that would be less likely to pass muster now. Today, while vanishingly few people are up for reciting poems such as Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” or Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” vast numbers can eagerly and effortlessly recite hip-hop lyrics. They stock their brains with reams of language set carefully to rhyme and rhythm with an aim to summon essence, limn themes and delve into the real.

 

Of course, all songs’ lyrics are a form of poetry, and at no point did Americans lack affection for them. But true verse of the kind featured in hip-hop — poetry that does not rely on melody or harmony — centers the word alone. Melody tends to go by more slowly than speech, and thus verse tends to pack in more words. It can be difficult to process a line of pitches mated to a long, dense sequence of words; the words alone, however, present no problem. In contrast to the synergy of song and word, verse is an especially heightened form of language alone. Rap is verse poetry, in all of its verbal richness and rhythmic variety, a deft stylization of speech into art. (I am referring to rap — i.e., rapping — as a subset of the broader cultural phenomenon of hip-hop, encompassing M.C.ing style, graffiti and dance, as well as the rapping itself.)

 

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, this new verse poetry was widely perceived as a niche interest: Black music that white kids (mostly boys) might choose to enjoy as game outsiders. But by the mid-1990s rap went mainstream, most of its listeners were white, and it had become for many younger Americans what poetry had been in the old days.

 

Today, not only can legions of people recite rap lyrics more prolifically than most could recite poetry back then, but it also decorates conversation and public statements. An audience member at a forum on race issues might, as I once heard, insert into her comments Grandmaster Flash’s “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the men responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, tweeted out, while he was still on the loose, “Ain’t no love in the heart of the city,” knowing that his audience would immediately recognize it as a Jay-Z lyric. And Tsarnaev is not Black.

 

Rap is America’s music in many ways, now prominent at even very white weddings. A Martian observer charting how our society savors artful language might make no differentiation between the work of Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop in the past and Nas or Drake now, in terms of their penetration of society. If anything, Nas and Drake would seem more important, because of the way modern technology can pump today’s poetry into the ear in a fashion impossible when prose poetry reigned solely on the page. The book collecting Jay-Z’s lyrics is a volume of serious artistic weight, and I’d be on unsure footing to propose that the work of Langston Hughes outweighs Jay-Z’s in terms of craft or breadth of subject matter.

 

There are those who might argue that rap is too specific, too rooted in a particular cultural idiom to qualify as America’s current version of poetry in the general sense. This, however, misses that modern America has become, in essence, much of what rap is.

 

Rap, for example, has never had much time for the King’s English. But then, especially since the 1960s, neither has most of America, as casual speech has taken over ever more of the space once maintained for old-fashioned, antimacassar-style expression. We no longer much enjoy lengthy orations in which speakers relish words like “shall” and “henceforth.” When is the last time you heard someone “make a speech” as opposed to “give a talk?” In both 2000 and 2016, America elected as president men whose interest in elegance of speech was approximate at best, in a way that would have all but barred them from high public office before the 1980s.

 

Of course, rap language is not Trump-speak. But just as in formal language one can be articulate (Robert Frost) and inarticulate (George W. Bush), in informal language one can be inarticulate (we all likely know someone; I need not tar anyone here) or articulate — a category that includes almost any prominent rapper. A true American poetry today must be articulate and vernacular.

 

Moreover, it is very likely to be Black. Poetry in the old days, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks notwithstanding, was considered a white thing. Rap, by contrast — and despite some excellent white practitioners — is a Black thing in origin and flavor. While racism obviously persists across America, in the cultural sense, Blackness is hot and pervasive.

 

The enlightened white person viscerally dismisses certain things as “so white,” the idea being that Blackness is more authentic, less uptight. In “Barbie,” the president is a Black woman. America’s most famous birder — a stereotypically white avocation — is Christian Cooper, a Black man. The two highest-profile versions of the musical “Annie” in recent years have featured Black actresses in the title role, as did Disney’s recent live-action version of “The Little Mermaid.” In this context, the last thing we would expect is that poetry of national significance would stem from the world — with apologies to Wallace Stevens — of white people sitting on porches in Connecticut.

 

But rap takes Blackness further than just the skin color of its pre-eminent practitioners. It is defined in part by a confrontational cadence. It isn’t an accident that rapping is referred to as “spitting.” We think of poetry as a form of reflection, but rapping is so often more specific: aggressive testimonies from down below, self-exoneration on the basis of prior circumstances, preaching about the best way to go, pushing against boundaries, all couched in a tone that grabs you by the lapels and discourages disagreement. Is this what Emily Dickinson and Paul Laurence Dunbar were doing?

 

Those two, not usually. But the oppositional fundament in rap is all about America today. Rap’s casting of disadvantage as heroism is simply one brand of a larger culture of therapy. What Philip Rieff described as our therapeutic culture as far back as 1966 and Christopher Lasch limned as our culture of narcissism in 1979 is now an American ideal: no longer to knuckle under and get past trauma, but to define ourselves as having undergone it and never entirely past it. Tupac Shakur laid it out as a spoken statement, on the track “Pac’s Theme (Interlude)” from his signature 1993 album: “I was raised in this society so there’s no way you can expect me to be a perfect person ’cause I’ma do what I’ma do. That’s how I feel. I’ma do whatever I like. I’m not a role model.” This is less hip-hop culture than American modernity.

 

When the choice of first-time book authors is more often than ever before the memoir, when one can curate and chart one’s life so vividly on social media, when we expect aspiring politicians to tell us about themselves as well as their policy positions, it is wholly predictable that our music will embrace the celebration and interrogation of self.

 

So when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we don’t merely celebrate the invention of a new musical form. We celebrate the one that made America — regardless of whether we recognize it — mad for poetry all over again.

 

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

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4) Environmentalists Owe an Enormous Debt to Julian Assange

By Mitchel Cohen

—CounterPunch, August 23, 2023

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/23/environmentalists-owe-an-enormous-debt-to-julian-assange/

Ivan Radic – CC BY 2.0

Environmentalists throughout the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to political prisoner Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of WikiLeaks—and most of them don’t know it.

It wasn’t only secret recordings pertaining to war and crimes-against-humanity that WikiLeaks published, based on the heroic work of Chelsea Manning who downloaded thousands of secret U.S. military files. A slew of cables Assange published revealed massive U.S. government attempts on behalf of Monsanto to coerce governments to allow foreign corporate land ownership, and with it genetically engineered agriculture throughout the world, and to squelch opposition to GMOs, breaking down existing laws prohibiting the genetic engineering of agriculture.

The cables revealed U.S. officials applying financial, diplomatic, and frequently military pressure on behalf of Monsanto and other biotech corporations.

These cables were followed by revelations that U.S., the World Bank, and IMF loans “opened up Ukraine to major corporate inroads,” writes Joyce Nelson in The Ecologist and also in Counterpunch. “Loan conditions are forcing the deeply indebted country to open up to GMO crops and lift the ban on private sector land ownership. U.S. corporations are jubilant at the ‘goldmine’ that awaits them.”[1]

The information, under the radar here in the U.S., reveals stipulations in the terms of the U.S.’s massive arms financing of Ukraine going back for more than a decade.

And on April 28, 2020, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill into law authorizing the sale of farmland in Ukraine, lifting a moratorium that had been in place since 2001. This bill is part of a series of policy reforms upon which the IMF conditioned its $8 billion loan package.[2]

WikiLeaks’ revelations about agriculture became the basis for understanding the mechanisms imperialism uses. The U.S. exerts its muscle on other countries to allow Monsanto et al. to take over huge tracts of land in Ukraine, bypassing direct purchase by foreign companies. Foreign ownership of land had been prohibited by law in Ukraine—a sudden realization that so-called internet “fact checkers” have been relying on to “debunk” news stories on the privatized dispersal of agricultural land there. But the “debunkers” ignore the many mechanisms utilized by foreign corporations to gain ownership and control of the land and skirt the law. So, we find massive U.S. corporate investments in Ukrainian companies, controlling the kinds of seeds planted and how they are grown.

In a 2007 cable marked “confidential,” Craig Stapleton, then U.S. Ambassador to France, advised the U.S. to prepare for economic war with countries unwilling to introduce Monsanto’s GM corn seeds. He called for retaliation, to “make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices. In fact, the pro-biotech side in France [has] told us retaliation is the only way to begin to turn this issue in France.”[3]

The U.S. diplomatic team recommended that “we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.”[4]

In another cable, this one from Macau and Hong Kong, a U.S. Department of Agriculture director requested $92,000 in U.S. public funds for “media education kits” to combat growing public resistance to genetically engineered foods. It portrays attempts to mandate the labeling of GMOs as a “threat” to U.S. interests and seeks to “make it much more difficult for mandatory labeling advocates to prevail.”

The cables released by WikiLeaks revealed that officials in the Obama administration, particularly in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, intervened at Monsanto’s request “to undermine legislation that might restrict sales of genetically engineered seeds.” Under Hillary Clinton, the U.S. State Department was so gung-ho to promote GMOs that Mother Jones writer Tom Philpott called the agency she presided over “the de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry, complete with figures as high-ranking as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mouthing industry talking points as if they were gospel.”[5]

The New York Daily News reported that State Department officials under Hillary Clinton were actively using taxpayer money to promote Monsanto’s controversial GMO seeds around the world.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoting Monsanto’s interests in Kenya in 2009. [Source: motherjones.com]

U.S. officials recommended pro-biotech and bio-agriculture DVDs be sent to every high school in Hong Kong.[6]

The cables reveal the joint strategic planning of Monsanto and the U.S. government. In one series, Monsanto concluded that northern Thailand would be an ideal location to cultivate genetically engineered corn for export to other countries, due to the area’s very low labor and infrastructure costs.

In this cable released by WikiLeaks, one country, Peru, is mentioned as recipient, and the U.S. official suggests that even with transportation expenses across two oceans included, it would nevertheless be more profitable to grow and ship GMO corn from northern Thailand than from neighboring Argentina or Brazil, since U.S. “diplomatic efforts” would be used to drive down the cost of production in northern Thailand. The U.S. would press Thailand to drop its opposition to GM cultivation, and the country would be rewarded.

The cables provide a fascinating (and terrifying) glimpse into the seemingly mundane mechanisms of global imperialism and consolidation of control of world agriculture on a very localized level.

WikiLeaks “acquired” and published a searchable database and unabridged text of the secret 2015 TransPacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Trade in Services Agreement.[7] By publishing the secret text of the agreement, Assange exposed the U.S. government’s pressure on other countries to purchase and plant Monsanto’s patented genetically engineered seeds, which required the concomitant purchase of Monsanto’s patented pesticides, in order for the crops to grow.

The treaties limited the ability of one country to legally challenge environmental depredation in trade with another, making it abundantly clear that environmental issues could not be successfully addressed in piecemeal fashion, but must be seen as integrated political, technological, economic, and scientifically packaged warfare. To succeed, movements would be compelled to not only examine the dangers of each pesticide du jour, but the underlying mechanisms by which corporations such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Novartis, BASF and other pesticide and pharmaceutical manufacturers have come to determine government policies overall, as well as those of global regulatory agencies, which in turn allow them to get away with masking the truth about their products and outright lying about their danger.

While socialist and ecology activists have always exposed the collaboration between government and corporate expansion, the details revealed by WikiLeaks’ published documents are nothing short of astounding. They reveal the need for ecological movements to develop far more radical strategies for dealing with the immense destruction by capitalism in practice, and not just in theory nor in a piecemeal fashion. For this largely unknown contribution by Julian Assange, ecological activists, along with antiwar radicals motivated by Assange’s publishing of the now infamous “collateral damage” video (obtained from Chelsea Manning), owe Assange a debt of gratitude that can never be fully repaid.

Today, Julian Assange is locked away in a British prison and is fighting for his life. The U.S. government seeks to bring this Australian citizen to the United States for a show trial and then lock him up forever, if they don’t assassinate him en route, as the CIA and U.S. State Department had discussed.[8] The sacrifices Julian Assange has made are profound, and his contribution to ecological as well as antiwar movements is enormous. It is incumbent on all to demand an end to his incarceration and torment by the U.S. and British governments.

And yet, despite worldwide exposure of glyphosate’s dangers and its designation as a “probable carcinogen,” only a handful of governments throughout the world have joined with environmental activists and health professionals in banning Monsanto’s Roundup. We need to turn up the volume:

Free Julian Assange NOW.

“No” to GMOs and the planet destroyers

—CounterPunch, August 23, 2023

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/23/environmentalists-owe-an-enormous-debt-to-julian-assange/

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[1] Joyce Nelson, “Monsanto and Ukraine,” Counterpunch, August 22, 2014, and also, Joyce Nelson, “Ukraine opens up for Monsanto, land grabs and GMOs,” The Ecologist, September 11, 2014.

[2] Oakland Institute, “Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict,” July 28, 2014; and also, Oakland Institute, Ben Reicher and Frederic Mousseau, “Who Really Benefits from the Creation of a Land Market in Ukraine?” August 6, 2021.

[3] https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07PARIS4723_a.html

[4] Ibid.

[5] Tom Philpott, “Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad,” Mother Jones, May 18, 2013.

[6]  Anita Katial, Senior Director Europe Operations at USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), is named as the responsible officer for the pro-biotech propaganda effort on behalf of the U.S. government. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09HONGKONG128_a.html

[7] https://wikileaks.org/tpp-final/

[8] Julian Borger, “CIA officials under Trump discussed assassinating Julian Assange – report: Mike Pompeo and officials requested ‘options’ for killing Assange following WikiLeaks’ publication of CIA hacking tools, report says.” The Guardian, Sept. 27, 2021.

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5) Hollywood Studios Disclose Their Offer on Day 113 of Writers Strike

The public disclosure of the Aug. 11 proposal was an unusual step and suggested an attempt to go around union leadership and appeal to rank-and-file members.

By John Koblin and Brooks Barnes, Aug. 23, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/business/media/hollywood-writers-strike-negotiations.html

Members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike for 113 days. Credit...Chris Delmas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In an apparent attempt to break a labor stalemate that has helped bring nearly all of Hollywood production to a standstill, the major entertainment studios took the unusual step on Tuesday night of publicly releasing details of their most recent proposal to the union that represents 11,500 striking television and movie writers.

 

The studios are confronting significant decisions about whether to push the release of big-budget films like “Dune: Part Two” into the next year, and whether the network television lineup for the 2023-2024 season can be salvaged or reduced to reality shows and reruns.

 

Shortly before the public release of the proposal, several chief executives at the major Hollywood companies, including David Zaslav, who leads Warner Bros. Discovery, and Robert A. Iger, the Disney kingpin, met with officials at the Writers Guild of America, the writers’ union, to discuss the latest proposal, according to a statement by the union’s negotiating committee.

 

By releasing the proposal, the companies are essentially going around the guild’s negotiating committee and appealing to rank-and-file members — betting that their proposal will look good enough for members to pressure their leaders to make a deal.

 

The writers’ union said that the studios’ offer “failed to sufficiently protect writers from the existential threats that caused us to strike in the first place.” The union described the public release of the companies’ proposal as a “bet that we will turn on each other.”

 

The writers have been on strike for 113 days. The studios and writers resumed negotiations on Aug. 11 for the first time since early May. Since then, there has been optimism within the entertainment industry that the labor disputes might be on a path to resolution.

 

But the public disclosure of the proposal by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, suggests that negotiations may have again reached an impasse. The studios and writers’ union had generally agreed to adhere to a media blackout while at the bargaining table, and the studio alliance has only occasionally released public statements before the guild.

 

“We have come to the table with an offer that meets the priority concerns the writers have expressed,” Carol Lombardini, the lead negotiator for the alliance, said in a statement that accompanied the details of the latest proposal. “We are deeply committed to ending the strike and are hopeful that the Writers Guild of America will work toward the same resolution.”

 

Hollywood has been effectively shut down since tens of thousands of Hollywood actors joined striking screenwriters on picket lines on July 14. Both the writers and actors have called this moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era has deteriorated their working conditions as well as their compensation levels.

 

The studios said that their latest proposal offered the “highest wage increase” to writers in more than three decades, as well as an increase in residuals (a type of royalty) that has been a major point of contention. The studios also said that they had offered “landmark protections” against artificial intelligence, and that they vowed to offer some degree of streaming viewership data to the guild, information which had previously been held under lock and key.

 

In the statement, the studios said that they were “committed to reaching an equitable agreement to return the industry to what it does best: creating the TV shows and movies that inspire and entertain audiences worldwide.”

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6) With TikTok and Lawsuits, Gen Z Takes on Climate Change

“We’re the last resort,” one young activist said.

By David Gelles, Published Aug. 19, 2023, Updated Aug. 21, 2023

David Gelles writes the Climate Forward newsletter.

“I started understanding how low income and Black and brown people in New York were disproportionately impacted by Hurricane Sandy,” he said. “People like me are at the forefront of the climate crisis.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/climate/young-climate-activists.html

Kaliko Teruya, 13, is one of several young people suing Hawaii over its use of fossil fuels. Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

Vic Barrett of the Bronx is one of the plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States. Brittainy Newman for The New York Times

As Kaliko Teruya was coming home from her hula lesson on August 8, her father called. The apartment in Lahaina was gone, he said, and he was running for his life.

 

He was trying to escape the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century, an inferno in Hawaii fueled by powerful winds from a faraway hurricane and barely hindered by the state’s weak defenses against natural disasters.

 

Her father survived. But for Kaliko, 13, the destruction of the past week has reinforced her commitment to a cause that is coming to define her generation.

 

“The fire was made so much worse due to climate change,” she said. “How many more natural disasters have to happen before grown-ups realize the urgency?”

 

Like a growing number of young people, Kaliko is engaged in efforts to raise awareness about global warming and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, last year she and 13 other young people, age 9 to 18, sued their home state, Hawaii, over its use of fossil fuels.

 

With active lawsuits in five states, TikTok videos that mix humor and outrage, and marches in the streets, it’s a movement that is seeking to shape policy, sway elections and shift a narrative that its proponents say too often emphasizes climate catastrophes instead of the need to make the planet healthier and cleaner.

 

Young climate activists in the United States have not yet had the same impact of their counterparts in Europe, where Greta Thunberg has galvanized a generation. But during a summer of record heat, choking wildfire smoke and now a hurricane bearing down on Los Angeles, American teenagers and 20-somethings concerned about the planet are increasingly being taken seriously.

 

“We see what’s happening with climate change, and how it affects everything else,” said Elise Joshi, 21, the executive director of Gen-Z for Change, an organization she joined while she was in college. “We’re experiencing a mix of anger and fear, and we’re finally channeling it into hope into the form of collective action.”

 

The youth vote’s mounting frustration with the Biden administration’s climate agenda is a wild card factor in next year’s presidential race. They are particularly livid that President Biden, who pledged “no more drilling on federal lands, period,” during his campaign, has failed to make good on that promise.

 

Young people are helping organize a climate march in New York next month, during the United Nations General Assembly. And their force is being felt even in deep-red states like Montana, where a judge on Monday handed the movement its biggest victory to date, ruling in favor of 16 young people who had sued the state over its support for the fossil fuel industry.

 

In that case, a lengthy fight resulted in a surprise victory that means, at least for now, that the state must consider potential climate damage when approving energy projects.

 

“The fact that kids are taking this action is incredible,” said Badge Busse, 15, one of the plaintiffs in the Montana case. “But it’s sad that it had to come to us. We’re the last resort.”

 

That mix of pride and exasperation is not uncommon among young climate activists. Many are energized by what they see as the fight of their lives, but also resentful that adults haven’t seriously confronted a problem that has been well understood for decades now.

 

“Do you think I really want to be on a stand saying, like, ‘I don’t have a future,’” said Mesina DiGrazia-Roberts, 16, another of the plaintiffs in the Hawaii case, who lives on Oahu. “As a 16-year-old who just wants to live my life and hang out with my friends and eat good food, I don’t want to be doing that. And yet I am, because I care about this world. I care about the Earth and care about my family. I care about my future children.”

 

In the Hawaii case, the youths have sued the state’s Department of Transportation over its use of fossil fuels, arguing that it violates their “right to a clean and healthful environment,” which is enshrined in the state Constitution. The state filed two motions to dismiss the case, but this month a judge set a trial date for next year.

 

A nonprofit legal organization called Our Children’s Trust is behind the Montana and Hawaii cases, as well as active litigation in three other states. A similar case it brought in federal court, Juliana v. United States, was thrown out by an appeals court in 2020, days before it was set to go to trial. But in June, a different judge ruled the case could once again proceed toward trial.

 

Vic Barrett, 24 and a resident of the Bronx, is one of the plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States and got interested in climate change a decade ago after learning about it in an after-school program not long after Hurricane Sandy inflicted widespread damage across the Northeast.

 

“I started understanding how low income and Black and brown people in New York were disproportionately impacted by Hurricane Sandy,” he said. “People like me are at the forefront of the climate crisis.”

 

Climate change is a growing political priority for young people. It was one of the top issues among a third of young voters in the 2020 presidential election, according to Tufts University.

 

But while the Biden administration has passed sweeping laws, including the Inflation Reduction Act, designed to speed the development of clean energy, it has also angered young environmental activists by approving new fossil fuel projects.

 

“It’s absurd that while the Biden administration this year is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the I.R.A., it is actively opposing Juliana and working to expand drilling on federal lands,” said Zanagee Artis, 23, who quit a job at Goldman Sachs to spend more time working at Zero Hour, a climate nonprofit he co-founded while in high school.

 

Mr. Artis, who helped organize a youth climate march in 2018, is still sending people into the streets. Zero Hour is now recruiting people to attend the March to End Fossil Fuels, which will take place in New York on Sep. 17.

 

Chief among the frustrations of Mr. Artis and his cohort was the administration’s decision to approve Willow, a huge drilling project in Alaska. Early this year, TikTok erupted with calls for the White House to deny approvals for the project, thrusting the issue into the mainstream and giving thousands of young people a common cause. Creators juxtaposed images of Mr. Biden with collapsing glaciers, recorded tearful selfie videos and mashed up songs from “Encanto” with slide shows of cute animals.

 

Their efforts failed. In March, the administration approved Willow, which is set to produce crude oil for another 30 years. But the #StopWillow campaign, which garnered more than 500 million views on TikTok, showed that impassioned youth could shape the national debate.

 

“It was still a win,” said Ms. Joshi, who posted the first #StopWillow video on TikTok. “Millions of people were talking about why a project in remote Alaska was important to our health,” she said. “That base building is going to be used for future campaigns.”

 

Across the movement, there is an effort to combat “climate nihilism,” the fatalistic acceptance that nothing can stop runaway global warming. That sentiment, captured in the phrase “OK Doomer,” contributes to the slow pace of progress, they maintain.

 

Spinning the fear and frustration that many young people experience into positive action is a chief aim of Wanjiku Gatheru, 24, who founded an organization called Black Girl Environmentalist that is working to get more young people of color involved in the movement.

 

“Fear doesn’t motivate people toward sustainable action,” Ms. Gatheru said. “Providing solutions in the midst of discussion of a problem helps get people engaged.”

 

Enthusiasm for the climate movement is spreading in surprising ways. A group of young techno optimists who shun doomerism have embraced the label of “Decarb Bros.” And among Republicans, millennials and members of Gen Z are far more likely than their elders to believe that humans are warming the planet and support efforts to reduce emissions, according to the Pew Research Center. Overall, about 62 percent of young voters support phasing out fossil fuels entirely, according to Pew.

 

On Maui, Kaliko and her family were trying to recover from the second natural disaster in five years. In 2018, flash flooding from Hurricane Olivia destroyed their home on the northern tip of the island. Now, the fire.

 

“We really need adults to wake up,” she said. “If we don’t fix this now, there’s not going to be a future.”

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7) U.S. Consumers Are Showing Signs of Stress, Retailers Say

Consumer spending remains resilient, but retailers’ latest earnings offered a glimpse into worrying shifts in shopping habits.

By Jordyn Holman, Aug. 25, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/consumer-retail-shopping.html

The strong performance at off-price and discount retailers stands in contrast to those at department store chains and many fashion and footwear retailers. Credit...Amir Hamja/The New York Times

Consumers power the U.S. economy, and their capacity to spend has repeatedly defied predictions. In early 2020, after a short but severe recession caused by the pandemic, consumers splurged on big-ticket goods, from patio furniture to flat-screen TVs and home gym equipment. Then came what economists called “revenge spending” with experiences that were off-limits during lockdowns, like traveling and going to concerts, taking precedence.

 

Now there are signs that some shoppers are becoming more cautious, as Americans’ savings erode, inflation continues to bite and other factors tighten their wallets — namely, the resumption of student loan payments in October. Financial reports from retailers — including Macy’s, Kohl’s, Foot Locker and Nordstrom — that landed this week suggest a shift is underway, from consumers buying with abandon to spending more on their needs.

 

“Last year it was more psychological,” said Janine Stitcher, a retail analyst at the brokerage firm BTIG. “But now that we’ve been dealing with inflation for as long as we have, I just think we’re getting to a point where savings are depleted.”

 

In the aggregate, consumer spending remains solid. Retail sales in July were stronger than expected, leading some economists to raise their forecasts for economic growth this quarter. A robust labor market and rising wages have buoyed consumer confidence.

 

But even retailers with strong sales say there are signs of economic strain among shoppers.

 

“It is clear that the lower-income shopper, our core customer, is still under significant economic pressure,” Michael O’Sullivan, the chief executive of the off-price retailer Burlington Stores, said in a statement on Thursday. In the three months through July, Burlington saw a 4 percent rise in sales and more than doubled its profit.

 

Discounters historically perform well during times of economic uncertainty as shoppers across the income spectrum look to save money. Burlington, along with Walmart, Dollar Tree and TJX, the owner of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, all reported a rise in sales last quarter, as shoppers sought discounts on essential items like groceries, turned to cheaper private label products and reined in spending on discretionary goods.

 

The strong performance at off-price and discount retailers stands in contrast to those at department store chains and many fashion and footwear retailers.

 

In calls with Wall Street analysts this week, retail executives also flagged rising credit card delinquencies and higher rates of retail theft, ominous signs that consumers could be more strapped for cash.

 

Jeff Gennette, the chief executive of Macy’s, the largest department store in the United States, said shoppers had “more aggressively pulled back” on spending in the discretionary categories, resulting in an overall decline in sales last quarter. Half of Macy’s shoppers make $75,000 or less.

 

“They are not converting as easily and becoming more intentional on the allocation of their disposable income,” he said.

 

“Probably the most important thing people are spending money on is general merchandise,” said Max Levchin, the chief executive of Affirm, which extends credit to shoppers at checkout via a so-called buy-now, pay-later model. “People are looking for more value for less money, or simpler functionality and lower price,” he said. The company reported an 18 percent rise in active customers from a year earlier.

 

The finance chiefs of Macy’s, Kohl’s and Nordstrom told analysts that delinquencies on the department stores’ credit cards had risen. In Macy’s case, the increase in nonpayments last quarter was “faster than expected.”

 

“When people are not paying their credit card bills, that suggests a really stretched consumer,” Ms. Stitcher of BTIG said.

 

And that means consumers are being more selective about where they shop and what they buy.

 

“You’re going to see brands that are winners and losers,” Fran Horowitz, the chief executive of Abercrombie & Fitch, said in an interview. The fashion retailer reported a jump in sales of more than 10 percent last quarter, as it was able to “chase” the new styles that got more shoppers through the doors, Ms. Horowitz said.

 

By contrast, on the same day Foot Locker reported a sales decline of nearly 10 percent for the quarter. It also cut its forecast for 2023 earnings for the second time this year, citing “ongoing consumer softness.”

 

The back-to-school shopping season now underway is crucial for retailers, a harbinger of whether there will be strong sales for the rest of the year.

 

And a new dynamic will soon come into play. In October, student loan payments will resume for about 44 million Americans, after a pandemic relief measure put them on hold in March 2020. Retail executives have warned that the payment resumption could further squeeze their shoppers’ budgets.

 

Halloween, which is just weeks after repayments resume, will also be a barometer for people’s willingness to spend on discretionary items like costumes and candy, said Nikki Baird, vice president of strategy at Aptos, a technology company that works with retailers like Crocs, L.L. Bean and New Balance.

 

She said that the repayments will most affect the age group that typically spends on Halloween. “I think that will really tell us what does this mean for the holiday season,” Ms. Baird said. “If Halloween is a bust, then I think we have to really start looking at whether consumers are going to go big for Christmas, because I think it says they won’t.”

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8) Hawaii Officials Release List of 388 People Missing From Maui Fires

The list names people still unaccounted for after wildfires devastated the town of Lahaina and other areas. Officials asked anyone on the list who survived the fires to come forward.

By Tim Arango and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Aug. 25, 2023

“Officials had said earlier on Tuesday that 1,000 to 1,100 people remained unaccounted for.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/us/maui-fire-missing-list.html

Officials have been bracing the public for the likelihood that the number of confirmed dead from the fires — which stands at 115 — will rise substantially. Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

Authorities in Hawaii released a list late on Thursday naming 388 people who are still unaccounted for in the aftermath of the deadliest wildfires in America in more than a century, which killed at least 115 people.

 

The fires devastated the coastal town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, as well as other areas of the island, more than two weeks ago. Search-and-rescue teams are still sifting through the last patches of ash and rubble looking for human remains.

 

In publicizing the names, the authorities hope to narrow the tally of the missing. In a statement, Maui’s police chief, John Pelletier, asked anyone who survived the fire to come forward and remove their name from the list. Officials had said earlier on Tuesday that 1,000 to 1,100 people remained unaccounted for.

 

The list released on Thursday, Mr. Pelletier said, includes anyone for whom officials have a first and last name and contact information for the person who reported them missing.

 

Officials have been bracing the public for the likelihood that the number of confirmed dead from the fires — which stands at 115 — will rise substantially.

 

“We also know that once those names come out, it can and will cause pain for folks whose loved ones are listed,” Mr. Pelletier said. “This is not an easy thing to do, but we want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to make this investigation as complete and thorough as possible.”

 

The decision to release the names of the missing came after F.B.I. officials, along with Maui Police, the Red Cross and other agencies, examined various lists compiled by shelters, cross referencing and combining them into one tally. Along the way, they identified many survivors and removed their names.

 

The final toll from the fire, which began in the grassy hillsides above Lahaina and, fueled by high winds, raced through the center of town to the Pacific Ocean, will probably not be known for months. Many people died near Front Street in Lahaina, which runs along the sea wall, in their cars or in the ocean. Many were trapped in traffic trying to escape the fire, with the surrounding roads blocked by downed power lines. Some older residents died at a senior living center.

 

So far, the authorities have released the names of 35 people who are confirmed dead and have been identified through DNA testing. Four-fifths of them — 28 people — were older than 60. On Thursday, the first child, a 7-year-old, was added to the list of confirmed deaths.

 

Countless families have endured an agonizing wait for news of loved ones who are unaccounted for. In the absence of official word, many have held out hope, traversing Maui clutching missing posters, placing them in post offices, hotels, parks and shelters.

 

Many relatives of the missing have been reluctant to submit DNA samples for comparison with human remains recovered from the rubble of Lahaina. On Tuesday, the authorities said they had received only 104 samples from family members, and they renewed urgent pleas for people to submit DNA, promising that the information will not be used for anything other than identifying the dead of Lahaina, and will not be entered into any other government databases.

 

“We need family members to come forward and donate their samples so that we can compare them to these DNA profiles we’ve already generated from remains,” Julie French, senior vice president of ANDE, a Colorado-based company that is using rapid DNA technology to identify remains in Lahaina, told reporters this week. “This is a critical step.”

 

Veronica Mendoza Jachowski, the executive director of Lahaina Roots Reborn, a social services organization that was formed in the aftermath of the fire, said many immigrants who may have lost someone in the fire have been worried about how their DNA would be used.

 

“‘Is it OK for me to go? Is it safe to go?’” she said she was asked. “At first we didn’t have a clear answer, but now we have the assurance.”

 

Some immigrants had been living in Lahaina by themselves, Ms. Mendoza Jachowski said, and their families are in faraway places like Mexico or the Phillipines. Lahaina Roots Reborn, she said, has been trying to arrange for relatives abroad to give DNA samples.

 

By releasing the names of the missing, Maui is following the example of what authorities did in Northern California after the Camp Fire in 2018. Initially, the list of the missing from that fire, which consumed the town of Paradise in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, reached 1,300, but was slowly trimmed following the release of the list. The final death toll was 85 people.

 

Until the blaze that decimated Lahaina, the Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in the United States since 1918, when a forest fire in Minnesota killed hundreds of people.

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9) Seafood Is Safe After Fukushima Water Dump, but Some Won’t Eat It

Sushi is among several shunned foods as Japan dumps treated radioactive water into the Pacific. Experts say the fear is irrational but understandable.

By Mike Ives, John Yoon, Hisako Ueno and Olivia Wang, Aug. 25, 2023

Reporting from Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/world/asia/fukushima-water-seafood-japan-china.html

Vendors and customers at a wholesale fish market in Beijing on Thursday, when China banned all Japanese seafood imports. Credit...Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Seafood is having a bad week in East Asia, which is bad news for a region where it’s a major part of the diet.

 

Experts say Japan’s discharge into the ocean of treated radioactive wastewater from the ruined Fukushima nuclear power plant, which began on Thursday, does not and will not pose health risks to people who eat seafood. But even though the scientific evidence bears that out, not everyone is convinced.

 

On Thursday, the Chinese government widened a ban on seafood imports to include all of Japan instead of only some regions. The wastewater release has been heavily politicized and fueled deep anxiety over seafood in both China and South Korea, leaving some wondering whether sushi, sashimi and other products were still safe.

 

At Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul on Friday, fish vending associations had put up banners urging consumers to not give in to paranoia.

 

“Our seafood is safe!” one read. “Let’s consume with confidence!”

 

“Don’t create anxiety with unsubstantiated myths and exaggerations!” said another.

 

Yoo Jae-bong, 52, who was trying to sell fresh halibut, croaker and sea bream at the market, the city’s largest, said there had been a rush of customers the day before the water was released.

 

“Then it died down,” he said. “There’s a lot of fear in the air.”

 

The wastewater released into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday is the first tranche of more than a million tons that is scheduled to be discharged over the next 30 years. The Japanese government and the electric utility that operated the plant have promised that the water is safe for humans.

 

International experts agree. The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog has said contamination of seafood outside the plant’s direct vicinity will be “significantly below any public health concern.” Independent scientists also say that Japan’s decision makes technical sense; that similar releases have occurred around the world without incident; and that the extra radiation will be tiny relative to what’s already in the ocean.

 

But ever since Japan announced its discharge plan two years ago, the issue has been contentious inside and outside the country — particularly in South Korea, a former Japanese colony where anti-Japanese sentiment tends to run high.

 

In those two years, the Japanese authorities and the international scientific community have failed to effectively communicate the science around the discharge and explain why the risks to public health are exceedingly low, said Nigel Marks, a physics and astronomy professor at Curtin University in Australia. As a result, he said, misinformation has filled the void and undermined public confidence in Japan’s plans.

 

“Nature abhors a vacuum, and everyone just poured in, and some of it stuck,” Mr. Marks said by phone on Friday.

 

“I’m sure they’d love to run it all over again and do it better,” he said, referring to the authorities.

 

Hirokazu Matsuno, a spokesman for the Japanese government, told reporters this week that it had “thoroughly tried to explain” the issue to the international community “based on scientific grounds and with a high degree of transparency.”

 

Ahead of the initial wastewater release on Thursday, several Chinese sushi brands either declared that their ingredients were not from Japan or promised to get rid of any that were. The Chinese government has fanned outrage in recent weeks over Japan’s plan to release the treated water, and tensions between the two countries rose further after the signing last week of a trilateral security pact between Japan, South Korea and the United States.

 

In Seoul, it has been common to see protesters holding signs showing dead fish and the radiation symbol.

 

This week, regional anxiety around fish and seafood, and the arguments for why it is still perfectly safe to eat, have gone into overdrive.

 

One sign of the anxiety emerged Thursday when the Seoul police detained 16 college students who had tried to barge into the building that houses the Japanese Embassy. Before they were taken away for questioning, the students unfurled banners and shouted slogans protesting the Fukushima water discharge.

 

In another indication of worry, there was plenty of fresh fish for sale at Noryangjin Fish Market on Friday — mackerel, octopus and sea bass, all swimming in tanks — but the vast concourse was so empty of people that a reporter could easily count the shoppers. Most fishmongers at the market, where the seafood is mainly from Korean waters, were looking at their phones or staring into space.

 

In Hong Kong, a Chinese territory where the local government has banned seafood from some but not all Japanese prefectures, the topic of seafood safety has been popular on social media this week.

 

Ivan Kwai, the manager of Kyouichi, a sushi and sashimi restaurant in Hong Kong’s Quarry Bay district, said on Friday that bookings had recently dropped by half.

 

“People have lost confidence,” Mr. Kwai, 60, said as he tapped a finger over his booking ledger. He added that he planned to replace his supply of Japanese products with Norwegian salmon, Canadian sea urchins and other imports.

 

As of Friday, it was unclear what impact anti-seafood sentiment would have on Japan’s exports in the longer term. But early data is not encouraging. China’s state-run news media said this week that imports of seafood products from Japan in July had fallen 29 percent compared with the same month a year earlier, a drop that Japanese news reports have linked to checks on seafood coming from Japan for traces of radiation.

 

If the negative sentiment sticks, it could potentially have a big impact on Japan’s economy. Last year, the country’s seafood exports were worth 387 billion yen, or about $2.6 billion, official data shows. Sales to China and Hong Kong accounted for more than 40 percent of the total.

 

That helps explain why, on Wednesday, Japan’s economic minister, Yasutoshi Nishimura, ate sashimi in Tokyo as news cameras rolled. “It’s really the best!” he said.

 

Not everyone in East Asia is bothered by the Fukushima wastewater release, of course.

 

At a branch of Umimachidon, a Japanese chain restaurant in Hong Kong that is famous for its sashimi rice bowl, a line formed during lunchtime on Friday.

 

“I’m not worried” about contamination, said Edward Yeung, 30, as he stood in line with his family. “I want to eat as much as I can before the price goes up.”

 

Siyi Zhao and Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting.

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10) 3 Men Exonerated in New York, 30 Years After False Confessions

Prosecutors said the men had been wrongfully convicted in two separate cases, one of which involved a detective linked to the false confessions of the “Central Park Five.”

By Hurubie Meko, Published Aug. 24, 2023, Updated Aug. 25, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/nyregion/false-confessions-wrongful-conviction-nyc.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=New%20York

Earl Walters has maintained his innocence ever since he was convicted in two carjackings and assaults in the early 1990s. Credit...Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times

In the fall of 1992, Earl Walters, then 17, was brought to a Queens police station and questioned as a witness in a carjacking and murder. Mr. Walters was then interrogated for 16 hours, without a lawyer present, about something else: the robberies, abductions and assaults of two women. Eventually, he confessed to being a “reluctant participant” in those crimes.

 

Two years later, two other young men sat in interrogation rooms in Queens. The men, Armond McCloud and Reginald Cameron, had been arrested in the fatal shooting of Kei Sunada, a 22-year-old Japanese immigrant, in the stairwell of his apartment building in LeFrak City. After being questioned through the night, Mr. McCloud, then 20, and Mr. Cameron, then 19, confessed.

 

All three would later recant, saying investigators had coerced them into taking responsibility for the crimes.

 

Mr. Walters was convicted and served 20 years in prison before he was paroled in 2013. Mr. McCloud served 29 years before his release in January; Mr. Cameron pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served about nine years before his parole in 2003.

 

On Thursday, nearly three decades later, a large courtroom in State Supreme Court in Queens was filled with supporters of the three men as each took his turn before the judge, Michelle A. Johnson, who threw out the convictions.

 

“In 1994, people did not believe that there was such a thing as a false confession,” said Elizabeth Felber, supervising attorney of the Wrongful Conviction Unit at the Legal Aid Society and Mr. Cameron’s lawyer. “But unfortunately, today, we’re learning it was all too common.”

 

Earlier, prosecutors in Queens and the men’s lawyers had filed joint motions asking the judge to vacate their convictions, saying the men’s confessions were coerced and riddled with inconsistencies, including inaccuracies based on an interrogator’s misunderstanding of a case.

 

They pointed out that a detective who investigated two of the men, Carlos Gonzalez, was also connected to wrongful convictions in the Central Park Five case and a notorious murder in a Manhattan subway station in the early 1990s.

 

Mr. McCloud’s case was the first one Justice Johnson addressed. As the prosecutor, Bryce Benjet, spoke, Mr. McCloud, dressed in a gray suit and glasses, with his dreadlocks in a high bun, sat with his elbows on the table, watching a monitor in front of him intently.

 

When he stood to speak, Mr. McCloud became emotional.

 

“Ten thousand six hundred and seven days. That equates to 29 years and 15 days exactly,” Mr. McCloud said. “I’ll be the first to tell you that those 29 years were not kind to me.”

 

Sitting several rows behind him, Mr. Cameron began to cry.

 

When it was his turn to speak, Mr. Cameron, who had pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery in Mr. Sunada’s death in exchange for the dismissal of murder charges, told the court how the conviction irrevocably changed his life.

 

Although he is happy that his name has been cleared, “it doesn’t fix things,” he said. “It doesn’t fix this scar on my face,” he said, pointing to a thick line about four inches long across his right cheek — a wound he got in prison. “I suffer from depression because of it,” he told Justice Johnson.

 

Since 1989, about 400 of 3,361 total exonerations nationwide have involved false confessions, according to data maintained by the National Registry of Exonerations. The group lists at least 230 exonerations for New York City since 1989.

 

In recent years, prosecutors in the city have sought the dismissal of hundreds of convictions tied to police officers who have themselves been convicted of crimes related to their work. Since the Queens district attorney’s office launched a Conviction Integrity Unit in 2020, 102 convictions — including the three on Thursday — have been vacated, according to a news release. Eighty-six of the convictions were tied to police misconduct.

 

“Fairness in the criminal justice system means we must re-evaluate cases when credible new evidence of actual innocence or wrongful conviction emerges,” the district attorney, Melinda Katz, said in a statement.

 

The cases before Justice Johnson on Thursday both involved coerced confessions, prosecutors said.

 

During his interrogation, Mr. Walters recorded a video statement that included “assertions that were at odds with the accounts of the victims and with the other evidence in the case,” prosecutors said this week. Still, he was arrested, arraigned and indicted. Before his trial, he tried and failed to get his confession suppressed from evidence, saying it had been coerced.

 

In the weeks after his arrest, there had been three carjackings with similar circumstances to the ones he had been charged with. Three men had eventually been charged in those cases, and two of them were later linked, using fingerprint evidence, to the crimes for which Mr. Walters was imprisoned, according to court filings and prosecutors.

 

Justice Johnson said the facts of Mr. Walters’s case were “particularly troubling.”

 

“As I sit here, I’m really, honestly baffled,” she said. Detectives and prosecutors ignored “glaring red flags” in the investigation, she said, and she apologized to Mr. Walters.

 

“The 1994 district attorney’s office failed to honor its obligation, to honor its search for the truth, no matter where it leads,” she said, adding that the “carelessness and indifference” shown in the case “shocks the consciousness.”

 

In the killing of Mr. Sunada in 1994, Mr. McCloud and Mr. Cameron were brought in after a 16-year-old who was being questioned in an unrelated robbery told the police that he had heard that someone who fit Mr. McCloud’s description had committed the murder.

 

After more than eight hours of interrogation, they confessed. But their statements contained glaring inaccuracies about the circumstances of the shooting, prosecutors said in court. They said Mr. Sunada had been shot in a hallway, when he had been found in a stairwell. Mr. Cameron indicated that there had been two gunshots, when evidence showed only one.

 

Their descriptions echoed reports written by Mr. Gonzalez, a detective in the Sunada case. The same errors also appeared in the initial police paperwork, according to prosecutors, which was “evidence that these facts were supplied” by Detective Gonzalez.

 

“The crime scene that the confession described is an impossibility,” said Laura Nirider, a false confessions expert who is one of Mr. McCloud’s lawyers. “And now we know why. The confession was, in fact, so wrong, it was scripted by a team of officers.”

 

Both men later recanted. Mr. McCloud said in 2021 that he had confessed because he was thirsty and exhausted, and because he was convinced his innocence would become clear in court.

 

After his conviction was voided on Thursday — the day before his fourth wedding anniversary — Mr. Walters stood outside the courtroom with his family, wearing a blue suit he said he had kept pressed and ready for months in hopeful anticipation.

 

He felt confident, he said. He had known this day was coming for 30 years.

 

But it is rare for a judge to detail the failures in a case and to apologize the way Justice Johnson did to Mr. Walters, said his lawyers, Glenn Garber and Rebecca Freedman of the Exoneration Initiative, a nonprofit that represents convicted people who say they were wrongfully convicted.

 

For Mr. Walters, the judge’s apology was renewing.

 

“Now I can have, like, ground zero to start from,” he said.

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