The White Rabbit News

Monday, May 15, 2017

In Heat of Dakota Access Protests, National Sheriffs' Association Lobbied for More Military Gear

At the end of 2016, as a mix of sheriffs, police, and private security forces were clashing with those protesting the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, the National Sheriffs' Association was lobbying Congress for surplus military gear and on undisclosed issues related to the now-operating oil pipeline. This information comes from federal lobbying disclosure forms reviewed by DeSmog.

The National Sheriffs' Association, a trade association representing sheriffs' departments nationwide, hired the firm Ervin Hill Strategy to lobby on its behalf during quarter four of 2016 and quarter one of 2017. Lobbyist and former congressional staffer John Blount was assigned to the cause. Blount did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The multi-state policing response at Standing Rock came under sharp criticism due to its highly militarized nature against the Native American-led opposition. Spurred by the North Dakota governor's emergency declaration, law enforcement officials nationwide began pouring into North Dakota under the auspices of the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC).

The lobbying disclosure comes as sheriff departments in rural America now look to the Dakota Access response as a policing crisis model, with some already bracing for similar demonstrations against the recently approved Keystone XL and Diamond pipelines.

“Professional Protesters”

Under what is known as the Defense Department's 1033 program, state- and local-level law enforcement agencies have the ability to purchase unused military gear from the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Logistics Agency. On its lobbying disclosure form, the Sheriffs' Association cited 1033, which goes by the motto “from warfighter to crimefighter.”

Throughout the duration of the Standing Rock encampment in North Dakota, the Sheriffs' Association served as a vocal critic of those participating, writing in an October 2016 letter to then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch that those protesting were “illegally preventing the completion of a project under the guise of environmental and cultural concerns — an obvious ruse.”

“They are threatening ranchers and farms and trespassing onto private property to intimidate and scare local citizens,” wrote the association in its letter. “It is nothing less than lawless behavior perpetrated by professional protesters with no vested interest in the Pipeline nor any ties to the communities they claim will be affected.”

TigerSwan Funding

Founded in 1940 and headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, the Sheriffs' Association has a $3.46 million budget, according to its most recently filed tax forms.

Some of the organization's funding comes from corporate sources, according to its website, which includes the private security company TigerSwan. As DeSmog reported in October 2016, TigerSwan maintains offices in both Iraq and Afghanistan and is run by a special forces Army veteran. TigerSwan was put “in charge of Dakota Access intelligence and supervises the overall security,” according to an investigation conducted by Morton County in North Dakota.

James Reese, TigerSwan's founder and CEO, formerly served as an adviser to the multinational private security firm Blackwater. Dubbed “the world's most powerful mercenary army” by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater was founded by Trump campaign donor and transition team member Erik Prince, the brother of U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos.

Post-Ferguson Lobbying

Beyond its lobbying efforts, the Sheriffs' Association has also made a public call for President Donald Trump to reverse the ban on sending military gear to local police agencies. President Barack Obama enacted this moratorium in the aftermath of the chaos and violence that followed the police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

“Sheriffs will work closely with President-Elect Donald J. Trump to repeal Obama’s Executive Order,” the organization stated in December. “We are hopeful the new administration is more supportive of law enforcement’s important work to protect people in harm’s way, instead of the previous administration’s repeated moves to cripple and prevent us from defending and helping citizens in need.”

President Trump spoke to and met with representatives from the Sheriffs' Association in February. At the White House meeting, the association showed its appreciation to Trump for helping push its agenda by gifting him a “new sheriff in town” sculpture, which was reportedly its first time ever giving one to someone outside law enforcement.

“Let me tell you the difference of six months,” Sheriffs' Association executive director Jonathan Thompson said at the meeting, according to a White House transcript. “I sat in this room, in this chair, and I was pleading — I was begging for help. Today, you’ve invited us here to your home. You're offering help. You're delivering on that offer. And on behalf of our members across the country, thank you.”

As an organization, the Sheriffs' Association had remained dormant on federal-level lobbying activity until the aftermath of Ferguson, according to forms reviewed by DeSmog. Blount, the Ervin Hill Strategy lobbyist for the Sheriffs' Association, also currently serves other military contractor clients including General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, and Aerojet Rocketdyne.

Dakota Access Owner Coordinates with Sheriffs

As protests heated up at Standing Rock in October, the Morton County Sheriffs' Department requested support from the Sheriffs' Association, which coincided with out-of-state cops flooding the state in assistance.

In December, DeSmog reported on an audio recording first obtained and published by New York Daily News writer Shaun King, in which Energy Transfer Partners executive Matthew Ramsey said that the Sheriffs' Association worked in close coordination with his company, the pipeline's majority owner, against those opposing it at Standing Rock.

“We met with some of the officials in North Dakota [during a recent trip to the state],” said Ramsey in the recording. “We met with the National Sheriff's Association. People are tired of this. They're tired of seeing what's going on in the community and we think that the tide has turned and people are understanding what a great project this would be for the State of North Dakota.”

Indeed, the Sheriffs’ Association did send training staff and office personnel to Standing Rock. The group tasked Dane County, Wisconsin Sheriff Dave Mahoney with training North Dakota agencies, which had little experience policing protests.

“When the situation in North Dakota began over the pipeline, I had been asked by the National Sheriff’s Association and by the Department of Justice to travel to North Dakota to speak to the sheriffs who didn’t have much experience with large gatherings,” Mahoney said in an interview.

While adamant his police force handled the response in Standing Rock in the same peaceful way as in 2011, when the Dane County Sheriff's Office handled over 100,000 people protesting Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker's Budget Repair Bill, the results in North Dakota tell a different story.

Greg Champagne, president of the National Sheriffs' Association and sheriff of St. Charles Parish in Louisiana, was also intimately involved in Standing Rock. In late October, Champagne traveled there for a publicity appearance, which was funded by the EMAC agreement. He was toured around the police lines and the construction sites, afterwards posting on Facebook a lengthy rebuttal to protesters and the media, which received 46,000 shares.

The St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office also sent two cameramen to video the cleanup after the eviction of demonstrators at one of the Standing Rock encampments. An open records request for that footage is still pending.

For its part, the Sheriffs’ Association told DeSmog, “What we were trying to do was help the local sheriffs, as a national organization, to coordinate the actions through the EMAC to get them people that would make themselves available.”

The association added that although the intent of its coordination was not to train law enforcement officials present at Standing Rock, that “per things like this, there is always training going on and coordinated tactics between North Dakota, Wyoming, Wisconsin or whoever else was there. We are also helpful with guidance and coordinating the knowledge as well by having people there like Dave [Mahoney, the Dane County Sheriff] who have better knowledge of large protest gatherings.”

Sheriffs Tackle Bayou Bridge

In the aftermath of Standing Rock, the Sheriffs' Association has remained active on pipelines owned by Energy Transfer Partners, including its proposed Bayou Bridge pipeline through Louisiana.

As DeSmog previously reported, Joseph Lopinto — an attorney with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana and former Republican state legislator — criticized the federal government's Standing Rock response while speaking on behalf of the National Sheriffs’ Association at a February public meeting related to the Bayou Bridge pipeline.

“The federal government failed to provide local law enforcement [in Standing Rock, North Dakota] with support to control hostile, often violent protesters that caused millions of dollars in property damage and shot at law enforcement officers,” he said at the convening. “The federal government failed to provide local law enforcement with the resources they need to deal with violent and unruly protests.”

Policing Protest

The intervention of the Sheriffs’ Association in social justice movements, such as the one at Standing Rock, is not unprecedented.

During the civil rights era, the Sheriffs' Association policed protests in Alameda County, California, which houses the City of Berkeley and the University of California. The association's California state representative, Alameda County Sheriff Frank Madigan, described these policing efforts during a 1970 congressional hearing about the Black Panther Party.

“Prior to World War II, I worked in the field as an investigator of subversives and now I am seeing the children back in the scene, what we call the Red-diaper babies getting into the act,” remarked Madigan. “Since Berkeley has become a Mecca we are getting dissidents from all over the country.”

“Red diaper baby” was a term applied to the child of socialists or communists (either self-described or as described by law enforcement officials), and was generally meant as a pejorative and to discredit. The Black Panther Party and campus-based antiwar movement, which were the subject of the 1970 hearing, were at the time the target of extensive surveillance and attempted disruption under the FBI's COINTELPRO (short for Counterintelligence Program). COINTELPRO eventually was scrutinized in a U.S. Senate probe known as the Church Committee investigation (named after then-U.S. Sen. Frank Church), and nominally came to an end.

Alex Vitale, a professor of criminology at Brooklyn College and author of the forthcoming book The End of Policing, told DeSmog that Standing Rock and the role of the Sheriffs' Association serves as a case study of broader policing trends seen during social movements.

“The 1033 program [lobbied for by the Sheriffs’ Association] should be understood in two ways,” said Vitale.

“First it is a cynical form of corporate welfare to the defense industry. It has opened up vast new federally subsidized markets by normalizing the idea that local police departments, no matter how small, need vast arsenals of military gear to defend themselves from the exaggerated threats of hidden terrorist cells and rampaging drug gangs. Second, it is part of an ideological worldview that the threats we face as a society are best dealt with by ever more police power.”

Trump Escalates Attack on Healthcare, Women With Rebranded and Expanded Global Gag Rule

"The Global Gag Rule doesn't protect lives; it destroys them."

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By Andrea Germanos

President Donald Trump spent part of his first Monday in office following in the footsteps of other Republican presidents by reinstating the Global Gag Rule, officially known as the Mexico City Policy.

The Reagan-era rule bars U.S. aid from going to international NGOs that offer abortion services or even provide information about it as an option—even when they use non-U.S. funds to do so. It's been criticized for devastating not only reproductive healthcare services but primary healthcare services as well, as clinics, faced with budget shortfalls, are forced to cut back or shut down completely.

And it was made clear, from that January memorandum, that Trump's order would mark an expansion of the rule, as it directed the Secretary of State "to implement a plan to extend the requirements of the reinstated Memorandum to global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies." As Human Rights Watch explained in March:

Under previous Republican administrations, the restrictions in the Mexico City Policy applied specifically to U.S. family planning funds, approximately U.S.$575 million.

Trump's policy extends restrictions to all U.S. global health assistance...

On Monday, CBN reported that "Trump is taking the pro-life policy to a whole different level," as the rule, rebranded as the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance" program, will affect $8.8 billion in funding.

CBN adds that the "nearly $9 billion in global health assistance funds will be appropriated to the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of Defense."

The State Department also announced Monday its plan to implement the policy, stating:

Under this expanded policy, "global health assistance" includes funding for international health programs, such as those for HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, malaria, global health security, and family planning and reproductive health.

It adds:

All foreign NGOs will have the opportunity to receive global health assistance awards if they indicate their agreement to abide by the terms of Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance by accepting the provisions in their award.

NARAL said the announcement showed the president was "yet again throwing women under the bus."

"President Trump is treating women's lives like political bargaining chips, trading them away to shore up his flagging support," said Sasha Bruce, senior vice president of campaigns and strategy for the pro-choice organization.

"Barely more than 100 days into his presidency, this pattern of behavior is an ominous portent of things to come for women and families. A man who was best known during the campaign for disrespecting and objectifying women clearly hasn't changed his behavior despite wielding even more power," Bruce added.

According to Brian Dixon, senior vice president of Population Connection Action Fund, Trump's "dramatic expansion of the policy needlessly threatens the lives and well-being of millions," and the re-branded rule is "just more brazen gaslighting by the Trump administration."

"The Global Gag Rule doesn't protect lives; it destroys them," he continued.

"It causes health clinics to close; it causes contraceptive shortages; it significantly reduces access to critical reproductive health care; and it, not surprisingly, causes dramatic increases in unsafe abortion. Rather than recognizing the utter failure of the policy, this administration has expanded its breadth, threatening global efforts to fight malaria and Ebola and Zika and HIV. And it will stifle efforts to address the challenge that unsafe abortion poses throughout the developing world," Dixon said.

One of Trump's Top Picks for FBI Chief Pooh-Poohed the Trump-Russia Scandal

So could GOP Sen. John Cornyn effectively lead the investigation?

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By AJ VICENS

President Donald Trump told reporters over the weekend that he would "make a fast decision" on his nomination to replace James Comey, the FBI director he fired in part due to, in Trump's words, the "Russia thing." Trump's sudden and brazen decision to remove Comey amidst the ongoing FBI investigation into possible ties between Trump associates and the Russian government earned him a week's worth criticism — even from a few Republicans. But at least one of the possible nominees Trump is considering would pose a significant problem. If picked to be FBI director, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) would manage an investigation that he has shown very little interest in seeing pursued.

The idea of nominating a Republican politician to the post has been criticized by members of both major parties. "John Cornyn under normal circumstances would be a superb choice to be FBI director," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said this weekend on Meet the Press. "But these are not normal circumstances." Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the senior Democrat in the US Senate, echoed Graham's concerns about Cornyn. "First, the nominee should be not a partisan politician, not part of either party. This demands a serious, down-the-middle investigation," Schumer said.

Cornyn does have some of the typical resume lines for an FBI director. Before he was elected to the US Senate in 2002, Cornyn served as a district judge in Texas, a judge on the Texas Supreme Court, and as the state's attorney general. But like many of his GOP colleagues in the Senate, Cornyn has been less than enthusiastic about the FBI's investigation into the president's ties to Russia. As a member of the Senate judiciary committee, Cornyn has said that the Russia affair should be investigated, but he has generally focused more on intelligence leaks and the issue of "unmasking"—the process of revealing the identity of an American incidentally caught up in US surveillance of foreign targets—that has been used by Republicans to distract from Moscow's meddling and to support Trump's unfounded claim that former President Barack Obama spied on him.

During a May 8 committee hearing on Russian interference during the election—where witnesses John Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general, talked extensively about the Russian intervention and the national security threat posed by Michael Flynn during his short stint as Trump's national security adviser—Cornyn used his time to slam Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, for not appearing before the committee, to decry the supposed "unmasking" of Flynn, and to press Yates on why she had refused to defend Trump's Muslim ban in court. He did not address the main issue at hand: Vladimir Putin's effort to undermine an American election.

Two days later, after Trump had fired Comey, Cornyn told reporters that it was a "phony narrative" that Trump had fired the FBI director in response to the Russia investigation. A day later, Trump, in an interview with NBC News' Lester Holt, did say that the Russia investigation was part of his motivation for booting Comey.

Cornyn hasn't always shown the same reticence to dive into politically sensitive investigations. In September 2015, he asked then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special prosecutor in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. At that time, Cornyn argued that the political appointees in Obama's Justice Department weren't capable of mounting an independent investigation. But these days, Cornyn resistscalls for a special prosecutor in the Russia scandal. Cornyn's office did not respond to a request for comment.

In December, Cornyn downplayed the Russia matter on Twitter:

"We've got a chance to reset here as a nation," Graham said over the weekend. "The president has a chance to clean up the mess that he mostly created. He really, I think, did his staff a disservice by changing the explanation. So I would encourage the president to pick somebody we can all rally around, including those who work in the FBI."

There Are 21 Million Victims of Human Trafficking Right Now: Coming to Grips and Trying to Solve Mass Human Suffering

Panel at Columbia explores the atrocities of human trafficking.

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By Ilana Novick

On May 10th, a panel convened by David Phillips at the Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Program on Peace-building and Rights,addressed the outrage that there are almost 21 million victims of human trafficking around the world, according to a 2016 report from the International Labour Organization.

The panel, co-sponsored by Elizabeth Salett, Director of Human Trafficking Search, (www.humantraffickingsearch.net) was organized "to raise awareness about the interconnection between human trafficking and armed conflict and the many forms it takes – whether it is through child recruitment, sex slavery, organ trafficking, forced labor or forced military service." Salett told AlterNet via email, "It was also to learn about the recent work of the UN Security Council and its efforts to the strengthen the international response to addressing human trafficking."

Lucy Usoyan, President of the Ezidi Relief Fund spoke first, explaining the plight of Ezidi women in Iraq and Syria under ISIS, how they are sold on the black market to ISIS soldiers and kept as sexual slaves and domestic servants for months, sometimes years. In Iraq and Syria alone, there are at least 3,000 Ezidi (an ethnically and religious Kurdish minority) women and girls enduring forced labor and sexual slavery at the hands of ISIS, who believe their atrocities are "a holy condition" as Usoyan explained.

Compounding the situation, even their liberation from ISIS doesn't guarantee a smooth transition home. In some cases, Usoyan noted, the women are rejected by their communities, treated as if their captivity and ISIS's cruelty were their ownfault. This presents an additional challenge for the institutions, like the U.N. and foreign governments who assist these women; freedom from ISIS does not necessarily mean freedom from persecution.

The next speaker, Tom Wheeler, Senior Policy Advisor, Development and Human Rights, United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations, exlained the opportunities and challenges said institutions have to fight human trafficking in all its forms. He discussed how the issue is "a high priority" for the current British Prime Minister, Theresa May.

He pointed to the Modern Slavery Act of 2015, which consolidates previous laws related to slavery, and according to Wheeler, provides more protections for women performing any kind of labor against their will. It also provides more stringent requirements for any business worth over £36 million (about $50 million in US dollars), to prove that they are preventing domestic slavery in their supply chain.

For UK-based companies, human trafficking is a problem in corporate warehouses, where workers are often paying off debts to human smugglers that brought them to the country. It's also a problem in countries where the companies aren't based, but get their source materials from, for example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where workers are forced to dig for minerals commonly found in our cell phones, overseen by various groups involved in local armed conflicts.

When the state is weak on enforcing anti-slavery laws, Wheeler believes it's up to businesses to recognize whether they are unwittingly participating in these conflicts by using forced labor.

The next speaker, James Cockayne, Head of Office at United Nations University elaborated on the role the United Nations can play in this issue. He noted that there are multiple policies and programs that touch on parts of the issue: armed conflicts, peacebuilding, labor, and migration but no one umbrella framework focuses on how they relate to each other in contributing to human trafficking. Siloing and fragmentation among departments, both UN speakers noted, is a key challenge; more coordination and communication between departments working on the programs and policies addressing human trafficking is crucial.

Of course, these programs and policies are also only as good as the people enforcing them. On the ground peacekeepers and relief workers in conflict zones need to be trained to look for signs of trafficking. During a question and answer session, one attendee mentioned that perhaps doctors too need to be trained to spot these signs, as they may be the first sources of aid that victims see.

Cockayne continued, this push must be done with political will, not only from the U.N., but from governments around the world. Cockayne believes that "we can't deal [with human trafficking] without political will because the people involved are the least politically powerful." Even on a micro level, trafficking victims are least likely to call the police, for fear of retaliation from their captors or even that their immigration status may be found out.

There are a few positive signs for institutions addressing the issue. In December 2016, the Security Council adopted its first anti-human trafficking resolution, after many years of assuming it was a decision for a country's own criminal courts to solve, even if countries like Iraq and Syria that don't have the infrastructure to do so.

The resolution asks the Secretary General to produce recommendations and report on progress in a year. Cockayne cautioned that the UN can't be the only actor involved: the body can "parse resolutions, have great debates," but getting these debates to translate into concrete action, "will require a whole other push." In addition to Theresa May's committment, Cockayne sees some promise in Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, who has said that his fight against human trafficking would be a core part of his government legacy, a sign, according to the UN staffers, that fighting human trafficking is a bipartisan issue.

During the closing remarks, Cockayne asked Usoyan whether the UN staff on the ground in Syria and Iraq were "assisting correctly." Usoyan answered that it depended on the area. In "Northern Syria sure there's a U.N. office, but it's been closed for a year." In Sinjyar, there are still 500 families living in tents and the U.N., she said, has refused to supply vaccines to Northern Syria. Cockayne promised a follow-up.

Perhaps more than the usual meeting locations, a classroom in Columbia University provided space for true candor and communication.

Trump Is the Symptom, Not the Disease

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By Chris Hedges

Forget the firing of James Comey. Forget the paralysis in Congress. Forget the idiocy of a press that covers our descent into tyranny as if it were a sports contest between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats or a reality show starring our maniacal president and the idiots that surround him. Forget the noise. The crisis we face is not embodied in the public images of the politicians that run our dysfunctional government. The crisis we face is the result of a four-decade-long, slow-motion corporate coup that has rendered the citizen impotent, left us without any authentic democratic institutions and allowed corporate and military power to become omnipotent. This crisis has spawned a corrupt electoral system of legalized bribery and empowered those public figures that master the arts of entertainment and artifice. And if we do not overthrow the neoliberal, corporate forces that have destroyed our democracy we will continue to vomit up more monstrosities as dangerous as Donald Trump. Trump is the symptom, not the disease.

Our descent into despotism began with the pardoning of Richard Nixon, all of whose impeachable crimes are now legal, and the extrajudicial assault, including targeted assassinations and imprisonment, carried out on dissidents and radicals, especially black radicals. It began with the creation of corporate-funded foundations and organizations that took control of the press, the courts, the universities, scientific research and the two major political parties. It began with empowering militarized police to kill unarmed citizens and the spread of our horrendous system of mass incarceration and the death penalty. It began with the stripping away of our most basic constitutional rights—privacy, due process, habeas corpus, fair elections and dissent. It began when big money was employed by political operatives such as Roger Stone, a close Trump adviser, to create negative political advertisements and false narratives to deceive the public, turning political debate into burlesque. On all these fronts we have lost. We are trapped like rats in a cage. A narcissist and imbecile may be turning the electric shocks on and off, but the problem is the corporate state, and unless we dismantle that, we are doomed.

“What’s necessary for the state is the illusion of normality, of regularity,” America’s best-known political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, told me last week by phone from the prison where he is incarcerated in Frackville, Pa. “… In Rome, what the emperors needed was bread and circuses. In America, what we need is ‘Housewives of Atlanta.’ We need sports. The moral stories of good cops and evil people. Because you have that …. there is no critical thinking in America during this period. You have emotion [only]. When I look at someone who is demonized, I can do anything [to him or her]. I can do anything. That’s how the state works, by demonizing people and putting them in places where they’re virtually invisible.”

“Here’s the reality,” he went on. “America has never come to grips with what a lot of scholars and thinkers call the Original Sin. That’s because it never stopped happening. This country brags about being founded on freedom. It was founded on slavery. It was founded on holocaust. It was founded on genocide. After slavery ended, after the Constitution was rewritten and amended, we have the Reconstruction amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. But what did the South do? They ignored it for a century.”

“It isn’t until the ’60s that you see this deep, rich emergence of people fighting for rights that were enshrined in the Constitution a century before [between 1865 and 1870],” he said. “That’s because every state in the South and many states in the North were allowed to make exceptions to the Constitution when it came to black people. We learned that’s not just a Southern reality.

You can’t talk about AEDPA, the so-called Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty [Act of 1996] unless you have the same mindset that makes the Constitution an exceptional document.”

Racist, violent and despotic forces have always been part of the American landscape and have often been tolerated and empowered by the state to persecute poor people of color and dissidents. These forces are denied absolute power as long as a majority of citizens have a say in their own governance. The corporate elites, however, frightened by what the political scientist Samuel Huntington called an “excess of democracy” that originated in the 1960s, methodically destroyed the democratic edifice. They locked the citizens out of government. And by doing so they made sure that power shifted into the hands of the enemies of the open society. When democratic institutions cease to function, when the consent of the governed becomes a joke, despots, cranks, conspiracy theorists, con artists, generals, billionaires and proto-fascists fill the political void. They give vent to popular anger and frustration while arming the state to do to the majority what it has long done to the minority. This tale is as old as civilization. It was played out in ancient Greece and Rome, the Soviet Union, fascist Germany, fascist Italy and the former Yugoslavia.

Trump, an acute embarrassment to the corporate state and the organs of internal security, may be removed from the presidency, but such a palace coup would only further consolidate the power of the deep state and intensify internal measures of repression. Millions of people, including the undocumented, those who have felony convictions, those locked in cages and poor people of color, have already been stripped of their rights, and some have been indiscriminately murdered by police. These minorities’ reality of daily state terror, unless this process of corporate pillage is halted, will spread and become normal with or without Trump.

In Abu-Jamal’s book “Live From Death Row,” he recounts his protest at a 1968 rally in Philadelphia held by the segregationist George Wallace during one of the Alabama governor’s runs for the Democratic presidential nomination. It is a reminder that Trump’s racism and lust for violence have long been part of the American character.

Abu-Jamal writes of attending the rally with three other black teenagers:

We must’ve been insane. We strolled into the stadium, four lanky dark string beans in a pot of white, steaming limas. The bank played “Dixie.” We shouted, “Black Power, Ungowa, black power!” They shouted, “Wallace for president! White power!” and “Send those niggers back to Africa! We shouted, “Black power, Ungowa!” (Don’t ask what “Ungowa” means. We didn’t know. All we knew was that it had a helluva ring to it.) “Black power!” They hissed and booed. We stood up in our seats and proudly gave the black power salute. In answer, we received dubious gifts of spittle from those seated above. Patriots tore American flags from their standards and hurled the bare sticks at us. Wallace, wrapped in roars of approval, waxed eloquent. “When I become president, these dirty, unwashed radicals will have to move to the Sov-ee-yet Union! You know, all throughout this campaign these radicals have been demonstrating against George Corley Wallace. Well, I hope they have the guts to lay down in front of my car. I’ll drive right over ’em!” The crowd went wild.

“Some police and other security came,” Abu-Jamal told me about the incident. “They escorted us out. We thought hey, we had a little fun. Our voices were heard. We went to the bus stop.

And two or three of us were on the bus. A young guy named Alvin and a young guy named Eddie. I was usually the slowest, so I was behind them. A guy walked up and hit me with a blackjack. Knocked me down. Pulled Eddie and Alvin off the bus. We were getting our asses kicked. It never dawned on us these were cops. They can’t just walk up to us and beat us up [I thought].”

“I remember seeing a cop’s leg walk by,” he said. “I shouted help! Help, police! The guy looked at me. Looked down at me. He walked over and kicked me right in the face. Then it dawned on me all of these guys were cops. That was a little taste of [what would happen later in] Philadelphia. An introduction to trauma. We see it today. I can hear Trump saying, ‘Beat the hell out of them.’ It’s like the old days. Those weren’t good days. Those were ugly days. And the ugly day is today.”

“I have been thankful to that faceless cop ever since,” Abu-Jamal writes of the assault, “for he kicked me straight into the Black Panther Party.”

Abu-Jamal’s experience embodies the endemic racism and collapse of the American court system that railroad young black men and women into prison and onto death row. The Federal Bureau of Investigation placed him under surveillance when he was 15 years old. His FBI file swelled to 700 pages. His crime was to be a dissident. He was followed, hauled in for questioning at random and threatened.

“While walking to work one day,” he writes, “I passed in front of an idling cop car. I glanced at the driver—white, with brown hair, and wearing dark shades. He ‘smiled,’ put his hand out the car window, and pointed a finger at me, his thumb cocked back like the hammer of a gun: bang—bang—bang—the finger jerked, as if from the recoil, and the cop gave it a cowboyish blast of breath before returning it to an imaginary holster. He and his pal laugh. Car rolls.”

The 1960s and 1970s saw a war on black radicals, which included FBI assassinations of leaders such as Fred Hampton. This war against radicals, President Nixon’s so-called battle for “law and order,” put the police, the FBI and other organs of internal security beyond the reach of the law. This power has only expanded since. We are all under state surveillance. And we can all become victims if the state deems us to be a threat. The loss of civilian oversight, along with the lack of transparency, is ominous.

Abu-Jamal was convicted of the 1981 murder of Daniel Faulkner, a white Philadelphia police officer. His trial was a sham. It included tainted evidence, suppressed defense witnesses, prosecution witnesses that contradicted their earlier testimony, a court-appointed lawyer, like most within the system, who was allotted few resources and had little inclination to defend his client, and a series of unconstitutional legal rulings by a judge out to convict the defendant. Terri Maurer-Carter, the stenographer at the trial, later signed an affidavit stating that during the trial she overheard the judge, Albert F. Sabo, say of Abu-Jamal, “Yeah and I’m gonna help ’em fry the nigger.” Sabo during his time on the bench sent 31 people to death row, more than any other judge in Pennsylvania. Abu-Jamal, who grew up in the housing projects of north Philadelphia, is imprisoned for our sins.

By 1977, Abu-Jamal, distressed by the internal feuding that tore apart the Black Panthers, had developed a close relationship with members of the Philadelphia MOVE organization. MOVE members lived communally, preached Third World radicalism, ate natural foods and denounced the established black leaders as puppets of the white, capitalist ruling elites.

The Philadelphia police, who constantly harassed the group, besieged the MOVE compound starting in late 1977. On Aug. 7, 1978, a gun battle erupted between people in the compound and police outside. A police officer was killed. Delbert Africa, a MOVE member, was savagely beaten in front of television cameras. Nine MOVE members would be charged with murder. The trial, like the one held four years later for Abu-Jamal, was a farce. It was clear, Abu-Jamal wrote of the legal lynching of the MOVE members, that “the law did not matter.” Two of the nine, Merle and Phil Africa, have died in prison. The seven other MOVE members remain, like Abu-Jamal, locked away and denied freedom by parole boards. Abu-Jamal was given life without parole after being taken off death row by the courts.

The Philadelphia police and the FBI were determined to root what remained of MOVE out of the city and do so with enough brutality to discourage any other black radicals from organizing.

“On May 12 [the date the two-day-long attack began], Sunday, Mother’s Day of 1985, our home was surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of cops who came out there to kill not because of any complaints from neighbors but because of our unrelenting fight for our MOVE sisters and brothers known as the MOVE 9,” Ramona Africa told me in an interview last week. (Authorities, as one of their supposed justifications for acting against MOVE, cited neighborhood complaints about activities and conditions at the compound.) “We had been attacked and arrested in 1978.

Thirty-nine years later, this August, they are still in prison. They became eligible for parole in 2008. The parole board just refuses to parole them.” [Chris Hedges’ interview with Ramona Africa begins at the 11-minute mark—click here for the video.]

“What people really need to understand is they did come out there [in 1985] to kill, not to arrest,” she said. “They could have arrested at any time. They did not come out there for any complaint from neighbors. Those running this country, this entire worldwide system, have never cared about black people complaining about their neighbors. It’s never been an issue. Obviously, it was something other than that. Which was our unrelenting fight for our family members who are still in prison. They shot over 10,000 rounds of bullets in on us within 90 minutes. They dropped a bomb.”

The bomb ignited a fire that burned down a city block containing 61 homes.

“The fire department, who was out there from the very beginning, was immediately aware that there was a fire on our roof,” she said. “A conscious decision was made to not fight the fire. To let it burn. When we realized our home was on fire, we immediately tried to get our children, our animals, and ourselves out of that blazing inferno. The instant we were visible to cops we were met with a barrage of police gunfire aimed at us so that we couldn’t escape that fire. After several attempts to get out, I got out first. I was able to get one of our children, a little boy named Birdie, out. We were immediately snatched into custody. I’m looking for the rest of my family. Trying to see if I could see anyone else. It was a little later after they had taken us into custody that I found out nobody else [in the MOVE group] survived.”

Eleven members of MOVE, including the founder of the group, John Africa, and five children, were killed in the police assault.

“The people who killed my family were never charged, never prosecuted, never imprisoned for anything,” she said. “Meanwhile, my nine MOVE sisters and brothers [convicted in the 1978 shootout], Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier [a Native American activist imprisoned in a South Dakota murder case], all the way down to line, are in prison with the accusation of murder.”

Abu-Jamal wrote, “May 13th, 1985, is more than a day of infamy, when a city waged war on its own alleged citizens, but also when the city committed massacre and did so with perfect impunity, when babies were shot and burned alive with their mothers and fathers, and the killers rewarded with honors and pensions, while politicians talked and the media mediated mass murder. On that day, the city, armed and assisted by the US government, dropped a bomb on a house and called it law. The fire department watched buildings ignite like matches in the desert and cut off water. The courts of the land turned a blind eye, daubed mud in their socket, and prosecuted Ramona Africa for having the nerve to survive an urban holocaust, jailing her for the crime of not burning to death. Eleven men, women and children died, and not one killer was even charged with a misdemeanor.”

Ramona Africa, charged with “rioting,” spent seven years in prison.

[For a 69-second video showing the bomb exploding on the Philadelphia compound roof in 1985, click here. For a 56-minute documentary about the assault on the compound and the circumstances surrounding it, click here.]

Our failure to defend those who are demonized and persecuted leaves us all demonized and persecuted. Our failure to demand justice for everyone leaves us all without justice. Our failure to halt the crushing of popular movements that stand unequivocally with the oppressed leaves us all oppressed. Our failure to protect our democracy leaves us without a democracy. The persecution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, MOVE members and all the radicals of four decades ago is not ancient history. It is the genesis of the present. It spawned the corporate coup and the machinery of state terror. We will pay for our complacency.

Waste plant polluting southwest Detroit neighborhoods

Go to Original
By Kathleen Martin

A new waste treatment facility located in southwest Detroit is pumping chemical emissions into the air, harming nearby residents and their children in the neighborhoods.

The facility is operated by New England Fertilizer Company (NEFCO), a biosolids processing company. It takes raw sewage from the Jefferson Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) treatment plant across the street and uses centrifuges to spin the waste into fertilizer for agriculture.

In May 2013, DWSD signed a 20-year, $683 million contract to become a client of NEFCO. The biosolids drying facility is the largest plant of its kind in the US.

Because the water treatment and processing plant had previously been fined for waste overflow violations, the plan was hailed as a sustainable and “environmentally sound” development by the media and Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) CEO Sue McCormick. The for-profit company operates in a partnership with the ostensibly publicly owned water authority.

The $143 million biosolids plant began operating in April 2016. According to an analysis of smokestack data by the Detroit Free Press , the plant has exceeded its permitted levels of harmful sulfur dioxide emissions over 2,500 times from April 2016 through February 28, 2017. This is in violation of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards for ostensibly acceptable emission levels every hour.

Air pollution in the southwest side of the city, a major industrial hub with an oil refinery, two steel mills, an auto plant and a garbage incinerator, is already worse than anywhere else in the state and the health risks facing the residents are serious. Detroit’s asthma hospitalization rate is three times higher than the national average.

NEFCO’s “At A Glance” portion of the front page of its web site claims that the company has a “socially responsible commitment to public health and safety, and the environment.” On the Detroit project, the site states, “The facility will feature technologically advanced air pollution, noise, and odor control systems ensuring NEFCO is a good neighbor to the community … Benefits from this contract include significant annual cost savings over the current management practice, capital cost savings by NEFCO providing dewatering at a significant cost reduction versus a DWSD centrifuge capital project that was planned, more efficient staffing, and a facility that greatly reduces impacts to the local community.”

The 2013-2014 Detroit bankruptcy, initiated by the Republican administration of Governor Rick Snyder and backed by the Obama administration, was used to attack city worker jobs and pensions, and sell off public assets. It led to the spinoff of the DWSD to a regional water authority, the contracting out of services to private companies like NEFCO, and funneling even more money into the hands of wealthy bondholders.

Mass water shutoffs have been reinstituted to squeeze the working class and poor residents of the city and a multi-national water privatizer—Paris-based Veolia—was brought in to lay off staff and slash costs. This process was inextricably linked to the switch of Flint’s water supply from water delivered by DWSD to the polluted Flint River, and the lead poisoning of the city.

As for NEFCO’s “commitment to public health,” the area’s residents adamantly disagree.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Liliana, a stay-at-home mom to her four children, and her husband Joel, an electrician, on their front porch in River Rouge, just a few blocks from the Jefferson plant. She has lived in River Rouge for eight years and five in the home she now owns.

“All my kids were raised in Southwest [Detroit],” she said. “We never had a problem there, never got sick. But when we moved here [River Rouge], my 13-year-old daughter started having spots on her skin. The doctor said it was fungal, and sometimes it goes away but it always comes back.

“I was pregnant with my youngest here. My son has speech problems. He’s still a little too young for a diagnosis, but they think he has ADHD. And when he was first born they had to put him on a nebulizer for breathing problems. I didn’t have to do that with any of my other children.”

Liliana pointed to a row of houses across the street and explained the complicated health issues facing former residents in each of the homes, including myriad respiratory issues and cancer. Each house is now vacant following the 2008 housing crisis. “My neighbor used to work for a steel company and he lived there for over 40 years,” she said. “His mom died of lung cancer and so did he. I never saw either of them smoke.”

Liliana and Joel purchased the home from her father after renting an apartment for a few years. She wanted to live near her parents around the block. She talked about how difficult it was to raise a family in filth and pollution, the effects of the poor air quality on her children and her own health. “You buy where you can afford,” she said. “But it’s not worth it here. I would have kept renting if I knew. I’m trying to get my parents to move, too. My parents are both diabetic and I want to be there for them but unfortunately not for much longer because I have to do right for my kids.” She and Joel are saving up money for a down payment on a new home in a different neighborhood, hopefully one with less pollution.

When asked about the water quality, she laughed. “Oh no, we don’t drink the water here,” she said. “If you let the water sit for too long it turns pink. I looked it up and I don’t know why it happens. So yeah, we don’t drink the water until we filter it, and we’re constantly changing the filter. Better safe than sorry. When you buy a house, the inspectors want everything to be a certain way. I mean we even had to buy special batteries for the smoke alarms and we had to redo the pipes. I told them we can fix everything up but if the city doesn’t fix the main pipes then it doesn’t make a difference what we do in our home.”

Referring to the poisoning of the water supply in Flint, just a few hours north, she said, “Whenever I hear people saying, ‘I’d move [from Flint] if it was me,’ I always said, ‘Well, if that was the case then we’d all be living in nice homes in Rochester,’” a better-off suburb north of the city of Detroit.

River Rouge and southwest Detroit have abandoned industrial buildings and fields, filled with broken glass, trash and piles of rubbish left over from long-closed production facilities like General Motors’ Fleetwood Fisher Body and Cadillac plants. “There are so many other places with nothing around. Why don’t they make those areas useful where no one will be harmed?” Liliana asked, saying that the factories should be moved where they will not be harmful to families. “Why would they do this if it’s hurting people? Why have all these industrial places near homes where people live?”