Sunday, July 19, 2020

George Monbiot on Empire and Systemic Racism

George Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books.

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Saturday, July 18, 2020

Report & Tweets from Portland

This happened in Portland twelve hours ago.







~~~ From The Oregonian ~~~

Feds, right-wing media paint Portland as ‘city under siege.’ A tour of town shows otherwise

July 18, 2020

As Cory Alexander and her daughter Nevaeh Belka stroll through downtown Portland, a mural catches the 9-year-old’s eye.

The wall of black plywood surrounding the Pioneer Place Apple Store is a memorial to Black Americans killed by police.
George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Jason Washington.
Nevaeh trots up the steps, faces her mother and raises a fist. Alexander, 46 and white, taps on her phone and takes a photo of her Black daughter.
“That’s what this is all about,” Alexander says.

But national media reports, particularly those published by right-wing outlets, suggest a vastly different version of how safe it is for children and families to stroll through downtown Portland.

One America News Network describes “violence gripping the city.” A Fox News headline blares “Portland protesters flood police precinct, chant about burning it down.” The New York Post reported Saturday that Portland “descended into violence.”

Many people who live in Portland, including Alexander, heard over the past few days from worried relatives in other states who feared that their loved ones in Portland might have been affected by fires or caught in police crossfire as they went about their day.
The images that populate national media feeds, however, come almost exclusively from tiny points in the city: a 12-block area surrounding the Justice Center and federal courthouse.

And they occur exclusively during late-night hours in which only a couple hundred or fewer protesters and scores of police officers are out in the city’s coronavirus-hollowed downtown.

Those events are hardly representative of daily life, including peaceful anti-racism demonstrations that have drawn tens of thousands of protesters, in a city of 650,000 people that encompasses 145 square miles.

The vast majority of Portland residents spend quiet home-bound lives on hushed tree-lined streets with coronavirus and its resulting economic catastrophe as the greatest threat to their well-being.

Portland has experienced weeks of daily protests since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police.

The largest of them, involving thousands of people chanting and marching for racial justice and police non-violence, have been peaceful.

But almost like clockwork, tensions flare late at night between law enforcement officers stationed at the Justice Center and courthouse and a crowd of 20- and 30-something demonstrators, a small number of whom toss projectiles at police, shine lasers in their eyes or otherwise poke and prod officers to engage.

The Portland Police Bureau often tweets photos of the objects tossed at officers, including rocks, half-empty cans of alcoholic seltzer and partially eaten apples.

But they’ve also claimed, without presenting evidence, that protesters, in the words of Police Capt. Craig Dobson, “often” lob water bottles full of urine or feces as well as “large mortar-style fireworks that can kill people,” endangering officers.

Law enforcement officials claim demonstrators’ use of such objects have required them to deploy tear gas, foam-tipped projectiles and other munitions against the hundreds gathered to disperse the crowd.

Smaller skirmishes have broken out at a pair of police precincts in other parts of the city and the Portland Police Association headquarters in North Portland, where officials accused demonstrators of lighting a dumpster on fire in an effort to set the whole building ablaze.

The agency has not been able to corroborate its claim that the union building was at serious risk. Nevertheless, images and video of the event, as well as fires lit at the base of the city’s historic downtown elk fountain, have galvanized conservative media across the country.

One particular viewer, President Donald Trump, has vowed to crack down.

His agency provided news organizations with a list of “violence” protesters have engaged in, the bulk of which consisted of vandalism to federal property, primarily graffiti on the courthouse exterior.

Portlanders swiftly rebutted Wolf’s portrayal of the city as under siege from violent protests, posting mundane scenes from their neighborhoods.

Among images they shared:
• A community garden in the Southwest Hillsdale neighborhood.
• Elephants bathing at the Oregon Zoo.
• Stickers on street signs along Northeast Alberta Street.

Some even poked fun at national reporters, one of whom declared he was about to parachute in to “sort out what in the world is happening” in the Rose City.

The Oregonian/OregonLive spoke to nearly two dozen Portlanders and visitors downtown Friday as Wolf and other federal officials continued to characterize the city as lawless and under threat of constant riots.

Johnny Leyua, left, and Stephanie Leyua, center, visited Portland from Salt Lake City with their family Friday and said the image of the city put forth by federal officials and right-wing media did not comport to what they saw touring downtown.Photo by Eder Campuzano/Staff

Johnny Leyua, 18, was touring downtown and marveled at the mural in front of the Apple Store where Cory Alexander photographed her daughter.

“I would say that people here are doing it right,” Johnny Leyua said. “I think Portland is straight for the movement.”
He and his sister, Stephanie Leyua, 20, live in Salt Lake City. She’s retrieving a car from her ex and said she’s seen nothing but artwork filling the streets.
Stephanie Leyua caught sight of Wolf’s tweets at the Justice Center, which showed him chatting with police against the backdrop of graffiti he estimates will cost $5,000 to remove.
“Why didn’t he take any pictures of this?” Stephanie Leyua said, gesturing to the mural of Floyd, Washington and other Black people killed by police.
Although the Justice Center and federal courthouse are covered with angry graffiti decrying police, evidence of other demonstrations in the city are scarce.
For a couple of days, protesters rallied in front of Mayor Ted Wheeler’s condominium in a tony Northwest Portland neighborhood. Demonstrators tried to set up a police-free zone like the one protesters in Seattle set up in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in June.

But Portland police quickly dismantled the pallets and other debris blocking off the road.

Now, the only reminders of the demonstration are spray painted letters reading “Little Palestine” on one crosswalk and, on another, “PKAZ” — short for Patrick Kimmons Autonomous Zone, named after a Black Portlander killed by police.

With most Portlanders sticking close to home amid coronavirus, however, national TV coverage has been able to shape even some Portland residents’ sense of protests and police action taking place in their city.

Maria Magdalena, who lives in North Portland, said her view of the city’s protests has largely been that of boarded up businesses and police occasionally declaring riots.

She primarily speaks Spanish and typically catches newscasts on the local Univision affiliate.

“Why do they go after businesses?” she asked about protesters. “None of this is their fault.”

Katherine Sherman, a mother of three who attended a protest at Cleveland High Friday, also said she saw local news outlets focusing on vandalism and confrontations with police, which she said distracted from demonstrators’ larger messages against police brutality and systemic racism.

“It misses the point,” she said. “It misses the beauty of this cultural moment.”

She wasn’t alone in her criticism.

In mid-June, editors at The Oregonian/OregonLive adjusted the way collections of photographs accompanying protest coverage appear on its website.

Readers pointed out that every morning report on the previous night’s demonstrations was rife images of cops in riot gear and protesters fleeing amid clouds of smoke, burying photographs of the larger numbers of Portlanders peacefully chanting, marching through city streets or rallying in parks.

Rather than publishing those collections in chronological order, which prioritizes the last images photographers collect, often of police clearing protesters out of downtown Portland, the news organization now manually reorders them to give readers a look at the totality of events of any given day’s protests.

“We have made clear distinctions between the large, peaceful demonstrations and continued peaceful demonstrations, separate from the smaller group that gathers downtown at night,” Editor Therese Bottomly said Friday.

As the national spotlight continues to shine on Portland, tensions have mounted between demonstrators and the federal police who patrol outside the courthouse.

The Trump Administration dispatched federal marshals and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents to protect the building from vandalism after Wheeler ordered city police to scale back their confrontations with demonstrators.

The move is largely seen as a campaign strategy on the president’s part as his approval ratings plummet and polls show him far behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Earlier this month, a federal police officer shot a less-than-lethal munition at 26-year-old Donavan La Bella’s face while he was holding a speaker across the street from the Justice Center, sending him to the hospital with a serious head wound.

Reports of federal agents apprehending Portlanders in unmarked vehicles began to circulate soon after.

The incidents galvanized demonstrators and prompted local and national officials to call for an investigation.
Critics say the government’s slow response to requests for transparency and the national media’s focus on the most salacious moments of the city’s demonstrations prove both federal officials and national reporters care more about property damage than the physical injuries protesters sustain on the streets.

Portland officials’ claims that demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism cost downtown businesses upward of $23 million and video of protesters toppling a statue of Thomas Jefferson at a high school in North Portland drew headlines across the country.

But follow-up reporting of a faulty business association survey that mischaracterized sales losses due to coronavirus-related closures as protest-related or the school district’s push to rename many of its buildings in a nod to the movement that led to the statue’s toppling haven’t spread beyond local media

Neither have stories about the protesters volunteering to feed houseless Portlanders in downtown parks, a group local police removed from the parks in front of the federal courthouse ahead of Wolf’s visit.

Meanwhile, La Bella’s dry blood still stains the sidewalk across the street from the Justice Center.

--Eder Campuzano | 503-221-4344 | @edercampuzano

This video appears in another excellent overview of events unfolding in Portland.


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Friday, July 17, 2020

Garrett Graff in Politico

Garrett M. Graff is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY: An Oral History of 9/11. He is now at work on a history of Watergate. He says that every year for nearly two decades the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire ATF. This paragraph in a Politico post got my attention:
To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
I copied the entire article here for future reference.
~~~~

The Story Behind Bill Barr’s Unmarked Federal Agents

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily-armed riot police around Washington in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or name badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cosplaying as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied eastern Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Nearly all of these agencies are headquartered in and around the capital, making it easy for Attorney General William Barr to enlist them as part of his vast effort to “flood the zone” in D.C. this week with what amounts to a federal army of occupation, overseen from the FBI Washington area command post in Chinatown. Battalions of agents were mustered in the lobby of Customs and Border Protection’s D.C. headquarters—what in normal times is the path to a food court for federal workers. The Drug Enforcement Administration has been given special powers to enable it to surveil protesters. It is the heaviest show of force in the nation’s capital since the protests and riots of the Vietnam War.

As large as the public show of force on D.C.’s streets has turned out to be—Bloomberg reported Thursday that the force includes nearly 3,000 law enforcement—it still represents only a tiny sliver of the government’s armed agents and officers. The government counts up its law enforcement personnel only every eight years, and all told, at last count in 2016, the federal government employed over 132,000 civilian law enforcement officers—only about half of which come from the major “brand name” agencies like the FBI, ATF, Secret Service, DEA and CBP. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which serves as the general academy for federal agencies who don’t have their own specialized training facilities, lists around 80 different agencies whose trainees pass through its doors in Georgia, from the IRS’ criminal investigators and the Transportation Security Administration's air marshals to the Offices of the Inspector General for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Railroad Retirement Board. Don’t forget the armed federal officers at the Environmental Protection Agency or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Law Enforcement, whose 150 agents investigate conservation crime like the Tunas Convention Act of 1975 (16 USC § 971-971k) and the Northern Pacific Halibut Act of 1982 (16 USC § 773-773k).

In and around D.C., there are more than a score of agency-specific federal police forces, particularly downtown where protests have played out over the past week, nearly every block brings you in contact with a different police force. A morning run around the National Mall and Capitol Hill might see you cross through the jurisdictions of the federal U.S. Capitol Police, the Park Police, the National Gallery of Art police, the Smithsonian Office of Protective Services, the Postal police, Amtrak police, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing police, the Supreme Court police, the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service, the Government Publishing Office police, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service. (Only recently did the Library of Congress police merge with the Capitol Police across the street into one unit.) Run a bit farther and you might encounter the FBI Police or the U.S. Mint police. And that’s not even counting the multistate Metro Transit police and the local D.C. Metropolitan Police.
The public has little understanding or appreciation for the size of some of these agencies, each of which has its own protocols, training, hiring guidelines and responsibilities. On the lighter side, few tourists know, for instance, that the National Gallery of Art—home to some of the world’s most famous artwork—has a shooting range for its police tucked away above its soaring central rotunda. On the darker side, the roughly 20,000 federal prison guards known formally as the Bureau of Prisons—whose riot units make up a sizable chunk of the officers imported to D.C. and who represent the single largest component of federal officers in the Justice Department—are concerning to see on the streets in part because they’re largely untrained in civilian law enforcement; they normally operate in a controlled environment behind bars with sharply limited civil liberties and use-of-force policies that would never fly in a civilian environment.

There are more gun-carrying agents employed across the federal government by inspectors general—the quasi-independent watchdogs responsible for rooting out fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars—than there are ATF agents nationwide; the roughly 4,000 inspector general agents nationwide, in fact, is roughly equivalent to the entire size of the DEA. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ police department, who guard the nation’s veteran hospitals, facilities and cemeteries, is larger than the entire U.S. Marshals Service.

Beyond those 132,000 federal civilian law enforcement, the U.S. has tens of thousands of military law enforcement officers, including military police units and investigators like the 2,000 agents of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the 1,200 agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service or the 900 agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Plus, the 40,000 armed personnel of the U.S. Coast Guard, which has broad law enforcement powers on the nation’s rivers, lakes and oceans, but is counted as part of the military.

Then there are the officers who can be spotted across Northern Virginia in white marked patrol vehicles labeled only as “United States Police,” the purposefully vague public name given to what is formally known as the CIA’s Security Protective Services, who provide security to the CIA and the Office of Director of National Intelligence. They carry weapons, but have limited law enforcement authority. (As one agent told me, only half-joking, “We can’t arrest you, but we can kill you.”)

The list of crimes these agents and officers collectively enforce is endless, so much that a tongue-in-cheek Twitter feed daily shares the most obscure federal criminal penalties. One of this week’s examples: “21 USC §331, 333, 343 & 21 CFR §150.160(b)(2) make it a federal crime to sell jam made from a combination of more than five fruits.” It’s hard to even say who might even be in charge of enforcing that one—perhaps the agents of the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations? (You should check out its “Most Wanted” page, in case you happen to have seen Cellou Jumaine, wanted for importing 990,000 counterfeit tubes of Colgate toothpaste.)

The Justice Department can’t even come up with a reliable count of the number of federal crimes on the books to enforce; it’s somewhere north of 3,000 but federal law is so voluminous and convoluted that no one has really tried to count it since 1982. When I was writing a history of the FBI, the bureau couldn’t even tell me the total number of criminal provisions it was specifically responsible for enforcing.

Many federal agencies have broad law enforcement powers—and can end up enforcing laws that wouldn’t on the surface appear to have much to do with their stated raison d’etre. Fun fact: The vast majority of the total arrests made by the Pentagon police, formally known as the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, are for drunk driving. Roughly every two or three days, an intoxicated driver gets lost in the maze of interstate roads around the Defense Department headquarters and takes a wrong turn into one of its parking lots. Such incidents account for as many as four out of five arrests the PFPA make annually.

The rise of so many specialized federal forces—and so many federal law enforcement officers overall—is a relatively recent phenomenon; the FBI was unarmed until the mid-1930s and modern incarnations of the DEA and ATF, for example, were only founded in the 1970s, as part of President Richard Nixon’s law and order push. Historically, it’s not altogether surprising that many of the personnel on D.C.’s streets this week have come from the Border Patrol and the Bureau of Prisons, which have long served as the nation’s “surge” national police force.
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What is surprising is that those two agencies now facing down Black Lives Matter and crowds protesting systemic racism historically have been enlisted by the federal government to protect blacks against white protesters. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for instance, deputized officers from the Border Patrol and the Bureau of Prisons to work as U.S. marshals and secure the University of Mississippi in 1962 to protect James Meredith as he enrolled at the school after desegregation. Similarly, the Border Patrol once watched over the Freedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s.

The biggest—and most troubling—shift in the makeup of federal law enforcement has come in the decades after 9/11, as the number of armed personnel has surged, law enforcement agencies have proliferated and oversight reins have loosened.

Whereas for years, the Department of Justice—which typically has strict oversight regimes and whose leadership is made up primarily of lawyers and prosecutors—accounted for the bulk of federal officers and agents, the post-9/11 growth of DHS has meant that it alone now accounts for nearly half of all sworn federal law enforcement officers. (There’s even a special 80-person police force within the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a component of DHS, that guards the president’s doomsday bunker at Mount Weather in Berryville, Virginia.) That shift means agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which after 9/11 replaced the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service, are now instead led by a department less grounded in the Constitution and whose leadership is more political appointees than career prosecutors.

More broadly, though, many federal agencies exist with little sustained oversight and continue to struggle with training, recruiting and use of force incidents. The Department of the Interior’s Park Police, one of the agencies that has served as the front ranks of the riot security in Lafayette Park, has long been one of the capital region’s most troubled law enforcement entities, with complaints and questions about its use of force and even a five-year-long lawsuit over the firing of its police chief after she complained about inadequate staffing. (This week, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who thanks to the District’s odd nonstate status finds herself in the odd position of not controlling the police forces patrolling her own city, blasted the U.S. Park Police and officers from the Secret Service—normally tasked with guarding the White House and foreign embassies in D.C.—for clearing Lafayette Park Monday night to allow Trump to walk across the street for a photo op at St. John’s church.) The Federal Protective Service, which oversees security at 9,000 federal buildings across the country, has been reorganized and reshuffled numerous times since 9/11, rarely spending more than a few years in the same box on DHS org charts. And after a hiring surge caused it to lower recruiting standards, CBP has struggled with a decade of rampant crime and corruption in its own ranks—so much so that for most of the past decade, a CBP officer or agent was arrested on average every single day—and its use of force has been widely criticized, even by professional policing organizations. (For a period of time during the Obama administration, the FBI actually declared CBP’s corruption was the nation’s biggest threat at the border.)
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The Bureau of Prisons has been dogged for years with questions about its management, training and tactics. Amid the protests in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, a federal inmate also with the last name Floyd (no relation) died this week in an encounter with guards in New York City after being pepper-sprayed in his cell.

Similarly, watchdogs have complained for years about the odd status of the U.S. Marshals Service, a federal agency with roots in the frontier and Wild West that today is in charge of protecting courts and judges, securing federal prisoners and hunting fugitives. The national service is still led across the country by 94 local politically appointed marshals whose posts are handed out as favors, not because of their law enforcement acumen. (The Boston Globe once famously surveilled for 10 days the U.S. marshal in Massachusetts, appointed after a stint on the security detail of the state’s governor, and found he worked an average of only four hours a day.)

Under the Trump administration, Cabinet officials have come under scrutiny for using the government’s law enforcement agents as a sort of Praetorian Guard: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned amid scandals that included his unprecedented 20-agent round-the-clock security detail, who picked up his dry cleaning and moisturizing lotion; Education Secretary Betsy Devos is protected by a detail of U.S. marshals at a cost of roughly $500,000 a month, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is under investigation after a whistleblower complained he was using his Diplomatic Security Service agents to pick up Chinese food or look after his dog. Even obscure Cabinet secretaries who could pass all-but unnoticed on any street in the country now warrant security: Want to be the special-agent-in-charge of guarding the Agriculture secretary? The Executive Protective Operations Division of the USDA’s Office of Safety, Security and Protection is hiring right now!

Concerningly, under the Trump administration, many of these agencies have been rudderless—overseen by rotating series of acting officials. More than half of all federal civilian law enforcement right now is being led by temporary acting officials, everything from ICE and CBP to DEA. (That calculation doesn’t even count the thousands of special agents in inspectors general offices that have recently seen an administration-wide purge of the government’s watchdogs.) The Bureau of Prisons was being overseen by an acting director last summer when Jeffrey Epstein managed to commit suicide while supposedly under strict monitoring. The DEA, with its special temporary powers for the protests, is currently led by an acting administrator who has been on the job for just days.

Such leadership voids are not solely a recent problem of the Trump administration: Thanks to pressure from the National Rifle Association on Republican lawmakers about the agency’s firearms investigations, the ATF has had a Senate-confirmed director for a total of only two years since 2003. Last month, the Trump administration withdrew its most recent nominee to be ATF director, Chuck Canterbury, a former police union leader who had been deemed by Republican senators as too liberal on guns. (Yes, you read that right: The former head of the Fraternal Order of Police was considered too liberal for the GOP.)

The proliferation of federal officers across government—and the proliferation of watchdogs watching those government agencies—means that you might one day be woken up by a SWAT team-style raid by the Department of Education or the EPA. And the number keeps growing: Congress was surprised when the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction—known as SIGAR—began procuring its own ammunition, flashing lights and body armor for its special agents. Just like its laws, there are too many federal agents for the government to keep track of.

The Covid-19 pandemic has even spawned what will apparently be the nation’s newest federal investigator: The Senate confirmed on Tuesday a special inspector general to oversee the $500 billion pandemic recovery spending. He, presumably, will be recruiting his own agents and equipment soon.
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Thursday, July 16, 2020

COVID-19 and the Pro-life States

Backup/file copy from Time online...

These States’ Leaders Claim to Be ‘Pro-Life.’ So Why Are So Many of Their Citizens Dying of COVID-19?

As the coronavirus surges across the U.S., states across the South and West have reported sharp increases in their daily number of new cases. While the initial outbreaks in New York and Seattle reflected where community spread of the disease began in the U.S., these more recent surges in Florida, Texas, Arizona and some two dozen other states reveal more about our capacity to respond. Many Asian and European countries that experienced their first cases and initial outbreaks at the same time we did have successfully suppressed the virus and returned to semi-normal life. Meanwhile, COVID spreads across the U.S. like contrast dye on an MRI, highlighting a malignancy in our body politic.

When we look closely at the data, the regions where the coronavirus is currently surging are precisely the places where white people have been manipulated by a distorted moral narrative for decades. Ironically, the governors who are most willing to watch their citizens die are the ones who have used “pro-life” rhetoric to compel people of faith to support the narrow interests of corporate greed and white political power. COVID has revealed how the “pro-life” movement is killing us.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Republican politicians who wanted to unite a white electorate in the South, the suburbs and across the Sunbelt knew they could no longer directly appeal to white cultural values in the wake of the civil rights movement. So they began using the language of traditional values and religious liberty to persuade white voters that the real problem in America is moral decline and cultural corruption. By framing women’s rights as an assault on traditional values, this movement mobilized white people who felt threatened by civil rights, women’s rights and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and ‘70s to assert their values as “pro-life.” They opposed abortion while promoting a narrative that blamed poor people for their problems and glorified the “opportunities” corporate profits afford to the industrious.

For the past 40 years, this narrative has been reinforced through a coordinated network of independent media, private school curricula, pulpits and political operatives. As investigative journalist Anne Nelson describes in her book Shadow Network, conservative Christians have increasingly come to live in a self-reinforcing wraparound culture of propaganda. When that network of information demonized efforts to address the current pandemic by staying at home, even from church, they resisted public health advice in the name of religious liberty.

In their book Taking America Back for God, sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead describe this way of seeing the world—where anything that challenges traditional values, including science, is viewed as threat—as “Christian nationalism.” While their analysis suggests that less than 20% of all Americans fully embrace this narrative, they say more than 30% have accommodated it in some way. This is especially true among white Christians and, in particular, in the South and Midwest. Their map of states where the highest percentage of Americans embrace Christian nationalism matches up almost exactly with the current map of where COVID cases are surging.

But the demographics of that map are shifting, and Republican strategists know it. Migration from urban centers in the Northeast to cities in the South and the Sunbelt have made the traditional Bible Belt much less white, threatening the power of “pro-life” politicians. It’s no wonder, then, that, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center, 25 states have passed voter suppression measures since 2010, and that they are largely the same states where politicians have used Christian nationalism to cling to power.

The distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism has allowed political leadership to claim to be “pro-life” for decades, even as they undermined the social safety net and public goods that protect and sustain life. Many of these same states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, denying access to health care to hundreds of thousands of their citizens. And because funding for rural hospitals was tied to Medicaid expansion under the ACA, this led to the closure of scores of hospitals in rural communities across the South and Midwest. In a small town in eastern North Carolina, we met a white man who lost his wife in 2014 after our state refused to expand Medicaid. She died of a heart attack waiting for a life flight in the local high school parking lot, just after the local hospital that could have saved her life had closed.

Though we spend more on health care per capita than any country in the world, the U.S. leads the world in coronavirus deaths. These deaths are not spread equally across our population. They disproportionately represent poor Black and brown communities and, increasingly, poor white communities represented by “pro-life” politicians who have manipulated faith to hold onto power.

If COVID is the contrast dye that allows us to diagnose this malignancy in our common life, then a new moral narrative that centers the common good and strives toward a democracy that works for everyone is the medicine we need. From the multicolored crowds marching for racial justice in our streets to the Black, white, brown, Native and Asian people who have joined us in the work of building a new Poor People’s Campaign, we see signs of a new moral movement rising in America. When we vote together, we can shift priorities in our public life. When we demand an America that works for all, we can revive the heart of a genuine democracy.
BY WILLIAM J. BARBER II AND JONATHAN WILSON-HARTGROVE  JULY 15, 2020
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of Repairers of the Breach, is a co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, a movement to build the power of poor people and change the public narrative on poverty.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is author of Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good.
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Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Black Lives Matter -- the First Seven Years


Black Lives Matter at 7 Years and the Meaning of this Movement-Moment

By Melina Abdullah
July 9, 2020

“We are the diviners of change!” proclaims Janaya “Future” Khan. Three thousand people … significantly young and Black … fill the massive concrete steps at Los Angeles City Hall, pouring out onto the sidewalk, into the street, extending the length of the block and into Grand Park. The hotter-than-July sun shines on the faces of Youth Vanguard members who just finished speaking about their recent victory in LAUSD – ousting police from school campuses and cutting their budget by 35%.

To their left is veteran organizer and “Baba” of the movement, Akili, who has been engaged in the struggle since the late 1960s. You can feel the adulation and pride exuding from actor and activist, Kendrick Sampson, who just introduced Future as one of his all-time favorite speakers and comrades. Newly inducted President of United Teachers Los Angeles and BLMLA member, Cecily Myart-Cruz, stands among teacher-friends, students, and organizers from Students Deserve. She had just given her first speech as UTLA President … a fiery commitment to liberatory education and centering the wellness of Black students. Sister Fouzia Almarou, the mother of #KennethRossJr, dotes on her son and grandson – both 5-year-olds – after having bellowed out the most thorough tongue-thrashings of District Attorney Jackie Lacey imaginable, before the crowd marched from the Hall of Justice, where we initially assembled to City Hall.

I stand back, scan the crowd, rest my eyes on the faces of my three school-aged children, who are all firmly entrenched in the movement, and feel the Spirits of each of the names that we called during libation. Warrior Ancestors seem to dance among us. The families of those killed by police take a moment to exhale. Alongside the speakers, rotating, volunteer ASL interpreters sign, at the base of the steps non-Black allies hand out cold drinks, snacks, and requisite masks. A tall man at the center of the crowd intermittently leads chants from a bullhorn between speakers. The crowd erupts in cheers, chants, laughter, and occasional tears together … as if one massive organism. There is so much beauty and power in this space … a space that has grown to the hundreds of thousands for some demonstrations … and, before the murder of #GeorgeFloyd was sometimes limited to just a few dozen.

Last week, the New York Times pointed to Black Lives Matter as, quite possibly, the largest movement in U.S. history. Their measure is based on the number of people who have participated in Black Lives Matter protests, especially over the last several weeks. From the beginning, it was our clearly-stated intention to build Black Lives Matter as a mass movement. Movement organizers recognized that it is only through large-scale action that the kind of fundamental change necessary for Black people to get free can take shape. We have also learned that there are no shortcuts in this process.

For the last seven years, Black Lives Matter has worked to end state-sanctioned violence against Black people and struggle forward, in the Black radical tradition, to transform systems that were deliberately and intentionally designed to produce oppressive and deadly outcomes. The movement was birthed in Los Angeles, and built by a fairly small initial collective of visionary and committed Black folks, summoned together by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors. After the initial uprisings that followed the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of our beloved son #TrayvonMartin, Black Lives Matter members spent the year engaging in political education, smaller demonstrations, artistic and cultural endeavors, and relationship building. The murder of #MikeBrown was a watershed moment, marking the explosion of Black Lives Matter into a global movement. Organizers with particular skill sets were summoned to Ferguson. Chapters arose all over the country and the world. Black people, especially young Black people, committed themselves to the struggle. For two years, the movement remained in the headlines … and then, on November 8, 2016, the cameras turned. With the election of Donald Trump came the whiting out of Black Lives Matter. Lead organizers went from daily appearances on national news to a refusal by even local outlets to cover the killings of Black people by police and White supremacists or the demonstrations that followed.

The struggle for Black freedom, though, must continue whether there is media or not, when crowds number in the thousands or just a handful. The work is both visible and invisible; it requires skill, and heart. It was between 2016 and 2020 that the real work of building Black Lives Matter took shape in earnest. It was during this period that those for whom this was a momentary phase fell off, counter-organizers were exposed, and those with a real commitment stepped up. It was in this building phase, that we launched and intensified campaigns ranging from police accountability to #BlackXmas to #JackieLaceyMustGo, and readied ourselves for what was to come.

In April and May 2020, Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles pulled together the #BlackLADemands and assembled the #PeoplesBudgetLA coalition. For at least five years, BLMLA had issued the call to #DefundThePolice, to counter the Mayor of L.A.’s budget, which consistently spent more than 50% of the City’s general fund on LAPD. But it was following the excruciating, eight-minute-and-forty-six-second murder of #GeorgeFloyd at the hands of Minneapolis police when the “defund” demand became the clarion call.

On May 25, 2020, the world cracked wide open.

Black people, especially, felt viscerally what was meant when we said that “the system of American policing descends from slave-catching,” as the souls of every evil forebear shown through the face of Officer Derrick Chauvin as he defiantly shoved his knee in the neck of our Brother George and held it there.

As the breath was stolen from George Floyd’s lungs, his Spirit arose, joining Breonna, and Ahmaud, and Sean, and AJ, and Wakiesha, and Kendrec, and Rekia, and Tamir, and Andrew, and Redel, and Michelle, and Oscar, and, and, and … and shook awake all of the Black folks who had grown weary of movement work, and commanded more of non-Black folks who once thought it enough to not be active racists.

The world has cracked wide open.

Black Lives Matter has been doing the work for seven years. We have been disrupting White supremacy and building Black community. We have been doing work that is visible and invisible. We have been writing, and thinking, and healing, and organizing, and loving, and readying ourselves for this particular moment. For this movement-moment, for the coming radical change, for the realization of our Ancestors’ wildest dreams. For this chance to transform the world, for this ushering in of Black freedom.

The world has cracked wide open.

July 13, 2020, will mark the seventh anniversary of Black Lives Matter. Seven years ago, we pledged to build “a movement not a moment,” only imagining this movement-moment, only freedom-dreaming of the victories that are manifesting all around us. On this seventh anniversary, we continue to step out on faith, with courageous discipline, expansive vision, and immeasurable love for our people, committing ourselves with our whole selves to the struggle and to serving as the diviners of change.
Melina Abdullah, Howard University graduate with a Doctorate from USC, is a womanist scholar-activist. Her academic roles are connected with her activist role in fighting for liberating those who have been exploited many times and she was a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. LA Sentinel published her summary of the growth of BLM.

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Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Extremism Note: White Supremacists aka Boogaloo

Excellent column in Guardian by Lois Beckett @loisbeckett
July 8, 2020

White supremacists or anti-police libertarians? What we know about the 'boogaloo'

Five deaths have been linked to ‘boogaloo’ rhetoric, but there’s still confusion over how to label the developing ideology
An armed man holds a sign during a rally against the
death of George Floyd, in Detroit, Michigan.
Photograph: Rebecca Cook/Reuters


Men showing up to protests wearing Hawaiian shirts and carrying military-style rifles. Facebook groups full of intense discussions about imminent civil war.

Over the past year, online conversations about the “boogaloo”, an ironic term for a second civil war, have begun to coalesce into the beginnings of an actual movement, according to experts who monitor American extremists. Facebook has designated a network of “boogaloo” groups as a dangerous organization similar to the Islamic State, and banned them from both Facebook and Instagram. At least 15 arrests and five deaths have been publicly linked to “boogaloo” rhetoric, including the murders of two law enforcement officers in California.

But there’s still plenty of confusion over how to accurately label this still-developing ideology. Here’s a guide to what we know, and what we don’t, about the politics of the “boogaloo”.
Why experts classify ‘boogaloo’ supporters as ‘rightwing’ or ‘far-right’

In response to a news story about the potential threat “boogaloo” attacks posed to people in Washington DC, Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent a tweet denying that the “boogaloo” is “a leftwing OR rightwing” movement, and claiming: “They are simply violent extremists from both ends of the ideological spectrum.”

One CNN article on “boogaloo” supporters at protests included an interview with a man who claimed to be a “left anarchist”.

But extremism experts agree that “boogaloo” ideology overall is, in fact, rightwing.

How do they know? For one, they look at images of the “boogaloo” flag, which is sometimes emblazoned with the names of rightwing anti-government martyrs, including Americans killed in infamous standoffs with the police at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and during the occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge in 2016.

“The way we know the ‘boogaloo’ movement is a far-right movement is because they draw a line directly from Waco and Ruby Ridge,” said Alex Newhouse, a digital researcher at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at Middlebury Institute for International Studies.

“They hold up things like the McVeigh bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and the armed response to Ruby Ridge as heroic moments in American history,” where citizens stood up to government oppression, Newhouse said.

Like the rightwing anti-government militia and Patriot movements of the 1990s and 2000s, many “boogaloo” supporters see the current federal government as illegitimate, while remaining deeply patriotic. They revere the constitution and see themselves as the true descendants of America’s founding fathers. In their view, current US lawmakers are the equivalent of occupying British forces during the revolutionary war. Among the “boogaloo” merchandise for sale online are images of George Washington armed with a modern, AR-15-style rifle.

Another clear sign that “boogaloo” boys are rightwing is their decision to show up with guns to guard private businesses, first during demonstrations against public health shutdown restrictions, and later during the protests over George Floyd’s killing, Newhouse said.

While “boogaloo” supporters showed up to George Floyd protests saying they wanted to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters against police violence, some also described going to protests to “defend businesses – including big national corporations – against looters and destruction”. [See image]

Showing up with guns to protect big corporations from property damage is not something that most leftwing protesters would do, Newhouse said, since leftists would be more like to view corporate stores such as Hobby Lobby or Ross as “part and parcel of capitalist exploitation”.

This emphasis on the importance of private property is part of what makes the “boogaloo” “very much an extreme right libertarian ideology”, Newhouse said.

Support for unfettered gun rights, and fierce opposition to most or all gun control, is also central to “boogaloo” supporters, with some pro-gun advocates using the term “boogaloo” to refer specifically to the civil war that will break out if Democratic politicians ever try to confiscate Americans’ guns.

While some anarchists have embraced “boogaloo” rhetoric, these are primarily are “rightwing anarchists”, who believe in “unfettered capitalism”, not leftwing anarchists, said Mark Pitcavage, a researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

The Department of Homeland Security’s claim that “boogaloo” is not a rightwing movement is “playing politics”, said Daryl Johnson, a former DHS analyst who was forced out of the department after Republican backlash against a prescient briefing about the growing dangers of rightwing domestic terrorism.

“This is an ultra-nationalist primarily white movement of people who belong to the militias,” he said. “Could there be somebody that has different sympathies that’s part of it? Sure. It’s predominantly rightwing.”
Is the ‘boogaloo’ fundamentally a white supremacist movement?

There’s no question that some “boogaloo” supporters are explicit white nationalists and neo-Nazis who use the term “boogaloo” as a synonym for a coming race war.

But there’s real disagreement, even among experts who monitor extremist groups, about whether the “boogaloo” movement as a whole should be described as “white supremacist.”

Analysts from the Anti-Defamation League and Middlebury’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism have argued that a significant number of “boogaloo” supporters are genuinely not white supremacist, and that the movement in fact has two wings, one advocating for race war and one obsessed with societal breakdown and rebellion against the government.

Arguments over white supremacy have played out on public “boogaloo” Facebook groups for months, the analysts said, with some “boogaloo” supporters, particularly group administrators, denouncing white supremacists and saying they want to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, even as other members of the groups made racist and antisemitic comments and mocked moderators for trying to be politically correct.

Tensions within the movement over supporting Black Lives Matter and pushing out overt white supremacists have been playing out for months, according to the first in-depth profile of the movement from journalists at Bellingcat. Some “boogaloo” memes and versions of the movement’s flag name black victims of police violence, including Oscar Grant and Breonna Taylor, among the movement’s martyrs. At the same time, some of the recent pro-Black Lives Matter statements on Boogaloo pages may have been motivated by group administrators’ desire to avoid a crackdown from Facebook moderators, Newhouse said.

Other experts say that lip service from some “boogaloo” supporters about wanting to be a multi-racial movement should not be taken seriously.

“We’re equivocating for the sake of an imagined audience,” said Joan Donovan, the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

“The idea that you would dismantle the US government at this stage is to undo the protections that have been granted to black, people, queer people, disabled people, to stop foreign policy related to immigration,” Donovan said. “There are always racialized and eugenic sub-themes in these groups. That’s what war is, at its base. It’s about who should live.”

“I don’t think you can get away from the ways in which the rhetoric supports a white supremacist ideology, once you start talking about the kinds of policies or strategies they think need to be implemented.”

One way to capture the complex dynamics of “boogaloo” ideology is to label it as a broad anti-government movement that is full of white power activists, said Kathleen Belew, a historian of the American white power movement of the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Because there are many Americans who believe in white supremacist ideas, but have never make an explicit effort to advocate for the cause, it’s more accurate to label people involved in racist movements as “white power activists” rather than as “white supremacists”, Belew argues.

Like the militia movement of the 1990s, not everyone who participates in “boogaloo” events or groups is necessarily a white power activist, Belew said. But it’s important to understand that many explicit supporters of race war are operating under the cover of a slightly more mainstream anti-government movement, she said, and that this is a deliberate strategy.

“Not all the people in the militia movement would be categorized as white power activists, but most of the white power movement was located inside the militia movement,” she said. Money, guns and people routinely moved between more mainstream and more underground, explicitly violent groups, she said, and that same pattern is likely repeating today.

For the Americans who are encountering armed men with Hawaiian shirts at protests in their hometowns, nuanced distinctions may not be that helpful.

On the ground, experts said, there’s really no way to figure out in real time if an unknown man in a Hawaiian shirt is a neo-Nazi looking to start a race war, or an anti-police libertarian who sincerely believes that he is not a racist. Asking “boogaloo” boys about their beliefs directly is unlikely to clarify much, since neo-Nazis and white nationalists routinely lie and claim not to be racist.

“No matter what your beliefs are, if you show up at a Black Lives Matter protest as a white man armed with a bunch of guns, that’s a white supremacist act, even if you don’t mean it to be,” said Emily Gorcenski, the creator of First Vigil, a project that tracks far-right individuals and groups. “Fundamentally, it will instill fear.”
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