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Welcome to Ayn Rand’s America

There’s a direct link between a sociopathic killer in 1927 and the GOP’s willingness to embrace a sociopathic president like Trump. That link runs through the work of Ayn Rand.

When Donald Trump was running for the GOP nomination, he told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead,” was his favorite book.

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

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Trump probably knew that anything by Rand would be the right answer for Republicans; the party has embraced her for decades, to the point that Paul Ryan required interns to read her books as a condition of employment.

Powers added, “He [Trump] identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.” Roark raged so much in the novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get his way.

Rand was quite clear about the characteristics she wrote into her heroes, and in particular Howard Roark. In her Journals, she writes of the theme of the book, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!”

On Howard Roark, she writes that he “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”

Roark seems like the kind of man who would brag about grabbing women by the genitals because, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” But this was long before Donald Trump was on the scene.

Instead, the man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was a real sociopath named William Edward Hickman, who lived in Los Angeles.

Ten days before Christmas, in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles, California, and kidnapped Marion Parker—the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.

Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father—back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”

After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.

The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”

Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.

“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”

But Hickman wasn’t finished. “After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.

He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.

On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.

Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.

Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.

But to a young Russian idealist just arriving in America, Hickman was a hero.

And while Hickman the man has, today, been largely forgotten, Hickman the archetype has lived on and influenced our nation in a profound fashion, paving the way for Donald Trump, a man with no empathy or consideration of social norms, to one day occupy the White House.

The kind of man who would pose with a tiny baby, the youngest survivor of a slaughter that he, himself encouraged with his hateful rhetoric, and mug for the camera with a thumbs-up sign.

Two years before William Edward Hickman was sentenced to death, a 21-year-old Russian political science student named Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum arrived in New York Harbor on a French ocean liner. The year was 1926, and she was on the last leg of her dream trip to the Land of Opportunity, scurrying across the Soviet Union, Germany, and France before procuring a first-class cabin aboard the S.S. De Grasse, bound for the United States.

Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. And etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners—the people who were rich with Russian money like Donald Trump—by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she witnessed Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy business, loot the store, and plaster on the doors the red emblem of the state indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”

That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind, that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

He was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved a level of national fame she craved—William Edward Hickman.

What young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman that would encourage her to base a novel, then her philosophy, then her life’s work, on him was quite straightforward: unfeeling, unpitying selfishness.

He was the kind of man who would revel in the pain parents would feel when their children were ripped from their arms and held in freezing cages for over a year.

In Hickman, Ayn Rand wrote that she had finally found the new model of the Superman (her phrase, likely borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche). Only a worldview held by a man like Hickman, she believed, could ever prevent an all-powerful state from traumatizing another generation of small businesspeople and their children as the Bolsheviks had her family.

Hickman’s words as recounted by Rand in her Journals, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else—even above friends, family, or nation—the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman—the monster who boasted of how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl—had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.

As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the mediocre American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman, much like today people Trump calls mediocre condemn him and the killings that may have emerged from his rhetoric, from Charleston to Charlottesville to El Paso.

“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”

Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote, “It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”

In other words, a man who lives exclusively for himself. A narcissistic psychopath. A man who could sell out his own country to foreign powers, tearing apart his nation’s people, just for his own enjoyment.

Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”

The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that could transform a nation.

“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”

The kind of man who would tell over 12,000 lies in two and a half years, who would daily lie to the press and his nation, just because he could—and would revel in it.

Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution, just like they’d caused Fred Trump to be arrested and fined for refusing to maintain apartments that black people had moved into.

Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found in the extremes her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich—the rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good. Only billionaires should rule the world, as Trump has suggested.

Trump personifies this, putting an advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA, an oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. His chief of staff said that putting children in cages (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good. Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”

She, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband, and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump and his billionaire backers, she believed that a government promoting working-class “looters” instead of solely looking out for capitalist “producers” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security—particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes)—was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game—selfishness is next to godliness.

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace.

Suggesting that selfishness undermines most American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.

“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”

As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.”

“We’re taught to feel concerned for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other—now why do you rebel?”

“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”

Rand’s philosophy, though growing in popularity on college campuses, never did—in her lifetime—achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. It was confined to college coffee shops, intellectual conferences, and true-believer journals, but never hit the halls of Congress, the mainstream television airwaves, or water-cooler political debates. There were the handful of “true believers,” but that was it… until today.

Now, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and the president of the United States.

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer, and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a sociopathic narcissist president.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment and more than 25 other books in print. 

The U.S. Government Doesn’t Care About Afghan Women

In once, and to some extent still, relatively cosmopolitan Baghdad, Iraq, I once saw three young female college students from Mustansiriyah University walking home from class. They couldn’t have been more differently clothed. One wore a full burqa that exposed only her eyes; another a hijab, a more modest head scarf without a facial veil, and a pair of jeans; the third sported a pink miniskirt and a revealing tank top with her long hair fully exposed. Still, they chatted like old friends.

By early 2007, this range of women’s clothing was already highly rare in all but the safest Baghdad neighborhoods, yet it did still happen. I remember woefully realizing that I, a 23-year-old American lieutenant, had been treated to a rare glimpse of Saddam’s largely secular (if brutal) regime that had preceded the U.S. military’s ill-fated invasion. Before Uncle Sam fractured Iraq and empowered Islamist zealots, I was often told by locals that men and women could go on dates and drink alcohol publicly in cafes along the Tigris River. But those days were gone.

Four years later, and even further east in the proverbial Greater Mideast, while patrolling rural Kandahar, Afghanistan—birthplace of the Taliban movement—I hardly even saw a solitary grown woman. There, in the backwater of a country full of backwaters, adult women were rarely seen outdoors and never without a male family member as an escort.

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It was all rather archaic and made Baghdad seem as liberal as Boston. I remember one young girl with shocking blue eyes, maybe twelve, playing close to my patrol base in the nearby village of Pashmul. Watching her skip a strange, improvised jump rope gave me rare moments of innocent joy in an altogether dangerous place I shouldn’t have been in in the first place.

Then one day, she disappeared, this (to me) nameless, joyful girl, never to be seen again. Eventually I asked a village elder, who probably played both sides—Taliban and America—against the other, what had happened to the blue-eyed Afghan girl. His answer was simple: puberty. She had had her first period, was immediately deemed a “woman,” and cloistered away behind the mud walls of her family home until her father decided to marry her off—likely to a much, much older man. Such was life in rural southern Afghanistan. It seemed most of the ethnic Pashtun villagers wanted it that way.

I think about that striking young girl occasionally as I repeatedly argue for the full and rapid withdrawal of the U.S. military from Afghanistan—which is, after all, the gold standard of hopeless wars. As I’ve predicted, it seems likely the Taliban will either conquer much of the country outright in the near future or at least maintain de facto control of Afghanistan’s Pashtun-dominated south and east indefinitely. That means Afghan women in those regions, and potentially many others, will suffer.

Yet, here’s the nasty truth: When I (and some 100,000 other U.S. troops) occupied much of Afghanistan, rural women still suffered. We could scarcely alter the longstanding cultural traditions of these regions. If, at the height of Obama’s Afghan surge, the status of most (largely pastoral) women didn’t change, what hope do the remaining 14,500 or so American soldiers still there have to protect these women? And after 18 years of stalemate, if—as now seems obvious—the U.S. can’t meaningfully win this war, what point is there in pining over the fate of human rights in this landlocked Central Asian time warp?

Sure, it’s disturbing, but it’s also a solid fact of life. What’s more, militarist, interventionist mainstream foreign policy wonks’ sudden feigned concern for the fate of Afghan women is cynical bunk meant only to prolong America’s longest ever war. It was never about women’s rights or humanitarianism in general. The U.S. military and CIA invaded Afghanistan out of vengeance for the 9/11 attacks, out of a degree of uncertainty about what else to do. Someone had to pay, someone had to be bombed, and bin Laden was, well, in Afghanistan.

Treating the terror attacks as an act of war rather than an international crime was then the original sin of these forever wars. The rapid decision to shift strategy in Afghanistan from limited counter-terror operations to nation-building, counterinsurgency and prolonged military occupation ought to be considered the second sin.

Make no mistake: The well-being of Afghan women hardly motivated the architects of the American invasion and occupation. Need proof? Here’s an ever-so-brief history lesson. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-89), the CIA not-so-secretly backed some of the worst Islamist theocrat “freedom fighters” against the Soviet-backed secular communist government then in power.

Whatever else Soviet socialist-style reforms brought to Afghanistan, they undoubtedly greatly improved the lot of local women, who gained full civil and social rights, access to education and prospects for professional careers. Uncle Sam hardly cared about Afghan women back then. It was not so long ago when Washington knowingly backed the most chauvinist theocrats in the Afghan mujahideen and, let’s not forget, the Islamists’ Arab volunteers—including one Osama bin Laden.

What’s more, if the many D.C.-based backers of continued, perpetual U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan were truly concerned with women’s rights, perhaps they’d raise the alarm about the millions of women oppressed by Washington’s ally, the Saudi absolute monarchy. After all, women in the kingdom live under the thumb of venal theocracy, as morality police roam the Saudi streets. This is a kingdom that still beheads women for “sorcery” and “witchcraft.” On this topic, you’ll hear hardly a peep from the dominant class of Washington interventionists.

One final note on mainstream militarist hypocrisy. A majority of these folks are older, white, socially conservative American men. Hardly feminists by any stretch of the imagination, on domestic policy they widely refuse to address the pervasive gender pay gap, have no stomach for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and support the escalating state-based war on constitutionally protected abortion rights. See, the militarists’ hypocrisy knows no bounds.

The whole phony concern for Afghan women’s rights in the wake of a potential U.S. military withdrawal is a canard. These hypocrites’ calls for perpetual war on behalf of Afghan women’s souls serve only as an excuse for imperial expansion, future domination of Afghan mineral wealth, a regional check on the growing Chinese dragon and mastery of potential oil pipelines to bypass Russia. It’s all old-fashioned geopolitics, folks, mixed with some absurd attachment by the military to dominance of the region. The Afghan people, especially women, rank as little more than pawns in a new Great Game in this long-contested region.

This author, as a former “guest” in the country, and as a (mostly) empathetic human, is sad for the women who do and will live under medieval Taliban rule. Still, the realist in me recognizes the limits of American military power, that the war shouldn’t have ever been fought and can’t be won. And as a born-again skeptic and a student of Afghan history, I know this much, too: Washington helped create what became the Taliban, sold out Afghan women to theocracy once before in the interest of embarrassing a Cold War rival, and never, ever, cared much about the plight of the blue-eyed girl who once made me smile.

I only wish the militarists in the foreign policy elite would admit as much, and leave the abandoned Afghan women out of it.

—

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major and regular contributor to Truthdig. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The LA Times, The Nation, Tom Dispatch, The Huffington Post, and The Hill. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.“ He co-hosts the progressive veterans’ podcast “Fortress on a Hill.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Confounding New Details Emerge in Epstein Case

NEW YORK — One of Jeffrey Epstein’s two guards the night he hanged himself in his federal jail cell wasn’t a regular correctional officer, according to people familiar with the detention center, which is now under scrutiny for what Attorney General William Barr on Monday called “serious irregularities.”

Epstein, 66, was found Saturday morning in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a jail previously renowned for its ability to hold notorious prisoners under extremely tight security.

“I was appalled, and indeed the whole department was, and frankly angry to learn of the MCC’s failure to adequately secure this prisoner,” Barr said at a police conference in New Orleans. “We are now learning of serious irregularities at this facility that are deeply concerning and demand a thorough investigation. The FBI and the office of inspector general are doing just that.”

He added: “We will get to the bottom of what happened and there will be accountability.”

In the days since Epstein’s death while awaiting charges that he sexually abused underage girls, a portrait has begun to emerge of Manhattan’s federal detention center as a chronically understaffed facility that possibly made a series of missteps in handling its most high-profile inmate.

Epstein had been placed on suicide watch after he was found in his cell a little over two weeks ago with bruises on his neck. But he had been taken off that watch at the end of July and returned to the jail’s special housing unit.

There, Epstein was supposed to have been checked on by a guard about every 30 minutes. But investigators have learned those checks weren’t done for several hours before Epstein was found unresponsive, according to a person familiar with the episode. That person was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and also spoke on condition of anonymity.

A second person familiar with operations at the jail said Epstein was found with a bedsheet around his neck Saturday morning. That person also wasn’t authorized to disclose information about the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Serene Gregg, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3148, told The Washington Post that one of the people assigned to Epstein’s unit wasn’t a correctional officer, but a fill-in who had been pressed into service because of staffing shortfalls.

It wasn’t clear what the substitute’s regular job was, but federal prisons facing shortages of fully trained guards have resorted to having other types of support staff fill in for correctional officers, including clerical workers and teachers.

The manner in which Epstein killed himself has not been announced publicly by government officials. An autopsy was performed Sunday, but New York City Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson said investigators were awaiting further information. A private pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, observed the autopsy at the request of Epstein’s lawyers.

The Associated Press does not typically report on details of suicide, but has made an exception because Epstein’s cause of death is pertinent to the ongoing investigations.

The House Judiciary Committee demanded answers from the Bureau of Prisons about Epstein’s death. Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, and the panel’s top Republican, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, wrote the bureau’s acting director Monday with several questions about the conditions in the prison, including details on the bureau’s suicide prevention program.

Inmates on suicide watch in federal jails are subjected to 24 hours per day of “direct, continuous observation,” according to U.S. Bureau of Prisons policy. They are also issued tear-resistant clothing to thwart attempts to fashion nooses and are placed in cells that are stripped of furniture or fixtures they could use to kill themselves.

Those watches, though, generally last only 72 hours before someone is either moved into a medical facility or put back into less intensive monitoring.

The jail does have a video surveillance system, but federal standards don’t allow the use of cameras to monitor areas where prisoners are likely to be undressed unless those cameras are monitored only by staff members of the same gender as the inmates. As a practical matter, that means most federal jails nationwide focus cameras on common areas, rather than cell bunks.

Lindsay Hayes, a nationally recognized expert on suicide prevention behind bars, said that cameras are often ineffective because they require a staff member to be dedicated full time to monitoring the video feed 24 hours a day.

“It only takes three to five minutes for someone to hang themselves,” said Hayes, a project director for the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives. “If no one is watching the screen, then the camera is useless. There are a lot of suicides that just end up being recorded.”

On the morning of Epstein’s apparent suicide, guards on his unit were working overtime shifts to make up for staffing shortages, one person familiar with the matter said. The person said one guard was working a fifth straight day of overtime and another was working mandatory overtime.

Epstein’s death cut short a prosecution that could have pulled back the curtain on his activities and his connections to celebrities and presidents, though Barr vowed Monday that the case will continue “against anyone who was complicit with Epstein.”

“Any co-conspirators should not rest easy. The victims deserve justice and they will get it,” he said.

According to police reports obtained by the AP, investigators believed Epstein had a team of recruiters and employees who lined up underage girls for him.

ABC News aired video Monday of FBI agents and police arriving by boat at a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands where Epstein had an estate.

In a court filing Monday, Epstein’s accusers said that an agreement he negotiated with federal prosecutors in Florida over a decade ago to grant immunity to his possible accomplices should be thrown out now that he is dead. Under that 2008 agreement, Epstein pleaded guilty to prostitution-related state charges and served 13 months behind bars.

At the time of his death, Epstein was being held without bail and faced up to 45 years in prison on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges unsealed last month.

Epstein’s death is the latest black eye for the Bureau of Prisons, which was already was under fire over the October beating death of Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger at a federal prison in West Virginia. The bureau is part of the Justice Department and falls under the attorney general’s supervision.

Taken together, the two deaths underscore “serious issues surrounding a lack of leadership” within the bureau, said Cameron Lindsay, a former warden who ran three federal lockups, including the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

A defense attorney for Epstein, Marc Fernich, also faulted jail officials, saying they “recklessly put Mr. Epstein in harm’s way” and failed to protect him.

Staffing shortages worsened by a partial government shutdown prompted inmates at the New York City jail to stage a hunger strike in January after they were denied family and lawyer visits.

Eight months later, the jail remains so short-staffed that the Bureau of Prisons is offering guards a $10,000 bonus to transfer there from other federal lockups.

In the wake of Epstein’s suicide, union president Eric Young of the American Federation of Government Employees Council of Prison Locals said a Trump administration hiring freeze at the Bureau of Prisons has led to thousands of vacancies and created “dangerous conditions” for prison workers and inmates.

In a statement, Young said that teachers, clerical workers and other support staff are regularly used to fill in for guards, and many guards are regularly forced to work 70- and 80-hour weeks.

Suicide has long been the leading cause of death in U.S. jails overall. In the federal system, suicides are rarer. At least 124 inmates killed themselves while in federal custody between fiscal years 2010 and 2016, according to the most recent statistics available from the Bureau of Prisons.

Placido Domingo Concerts Canceled as Harassment Probe Opens

SAN FRANCISCO—Two music companies canceled appearances by Placido Domingo and the Los Angeles Opera said Tuesday it would launch an investigation in response to an Associated Press story in which numerous women accused the opera legend of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior spanning decades.

Domingo has been general director of the LA Opera since 2003 and previously served as the company’s artistic director, jobs that gave him the power to cast roles and — his accusers say — make, or break, careers.

Some of the women told the AP that Domingo used his power at the LA company and elsewhere to try to pressure them into sexual relationships, with several saying that he dangled jobs and then sometimes punished them professionally if they refused his advances.

On Tuesday, the Philadelphia Orchestra and San Francisco Opera announced they would cancel upcoming performances featuring the star, regarded as one of the greatest opera singers of all time.

New York’s Metropolitan Opera said it would await the results of LA Opera’s investigation “before making any final decisions about Mr. Domingo’s future at the Met,” where he is scheduled to appear next month.

The 78-year-old Domingo is one of the industry’s most powerful figures and more than three dozen people in the opera world told the AP that his behavior has long been an open secret.

The accusers who spoke to the AP — all but one of whom requested anonymity — said they had feared speaking out previously would kill their careers due to his immense standing.

Domingo issued a statement to the AP calling the allegations “deeply troubling and, as presented inaccurate,” adding “I believed that all of my interactions and relationships were always welcomed and consensual.”

The LA Opera said it would hire outside counsel to investigate the “concerning allegations” against Domingo.

“Placido Domingo has been a dynamic creative force in the life of LA opera and the artistic culture of Los Angeles for more than three decades,” the company said in a statement. “Nevertheless, we are committed to doing everything we can to foster a professional and collaborative environment where all our employees and artists feel equally comfortable, valued and respected.”

Three women quoted in the story detailed encounters that they said occurred while working with Domingo at LA Opera, including one woman who told the AP that he stuck his hand down her skirt after urging her to come sing an aria for him at his apartment.

In canceling its invitation for Domingo to sing at its Sept. 18 opening gala, the Philadelphia Orchestra issued a statement saying: “We are committed to providing a safe, supportive, respectful, and appropriate environment for the orchestra and staff, for collaborating artists and composers, and for our audiences and communities.”

The San Francisco Opera said it would scrub a sold-out Oct. 6 concert featuring Domingo, which had been to mark his 50th anniversary with the company. It was promoted as a “special one performance-only event” with “one of the most influential singing actors in the history of opera” and was one of several gala events this year to celebrate his legendary career.

The Met held a black-tie dinner in April for Domingo, where seats started at $2,500. He is scheduled to play the lead of “Macbeth” in three Met shows in September and October.

“We take accusations of sexual harassment and abuse of power with extreme seriousness,” the opera house said in a statement, noting that “Mr. Domingo has never been in a position to influence casting decisions for anyone other than himself” at the Met.

At the Salzburg Festival in Austria, where Domingo is scheduled to appear Aug. 31 — his next scheduled performance — festival president Helga Rabl-Stadler said organizers agreed he should appear as planned.

“I have known Placido Domingo for more than 25 years,” Rabl-Stadler said in a statement. “In addition to his artistic competence, I was impressed from the very beginning by his appreciative treatment of all festival employees.”

“I would find it factually wrong and morally irresponsible to make irreversible judgments at this point,” she said.

Domingo served as artistic director for the Washington Opera from 1996-2003 and as the company’s general director from 2003 to 2011, during which time its name was changed to Washington National Opera. In 2011, the company merged with the Kennedy Center.

In a joint statement to AP, the institutions said the allegations against Domingo predated the merger.

“The Kennedy Center did not receive any documented complaints about Mr. Domingo’s behavior prior to WNO’s affiliation with the Kennedy Center, and we have not received any since then,” the statement said, adding that the company has “zero tolerance policies with regard to harassment, discrimination or abuse of any kind, and we take allegations of this nature very seriously.”

Retired mezzo-soprano Patricia Wulf, the sole accuser to allow her name to be used, told the AP that Domingo behaved inappropriately with her when she worked at the Washington Opera.

Even after she repeatedly rebuffed his advances, she said, his persistence continued and he would often knock on her dressing room door, causing her to fear emerging if he was in the hallway.

Wulf recalled the compassion of a male colleague who offered to stand up for her if she wanted to report him. “They’re not going to fire him — they’ll fire me,” she remembered telling him.

Too fearful to complain about Domingo at the time, Wulf said she spoke out now to end the culture of silence about abuse in the opera world.

“I’m stepping forward because I hope that it can help other women come forward, or be strong enough to say no,” she said.

Top Trump Official Disavows Statue of Liberty Greeting

Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli is under fresh fire on Tuesday after telling NPR in an interview that the famous words engraved on the U.S. Statue of Liberty—based on the poem by Emma Lazarus—should be re-cast with a qualifier when it comes to the kinds of people arriving at the nation’s shores seeking refuge or welcome.

“Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” Cuccinelli responded after being asked by NPR’s “Morning Edition” host Rachel Martin if the Lazarus poem, titled “The New Colossus,” remains part of the American ethos under the Trump administration.

Here’s acting USCIS director Ken Cuccinelli saying on NPR this morning that the Statue of Liberty plaque should be changed to read, “give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.” pic.twitter.com/q8OoNn3k6r

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2019

His appearance on NPR came a day after Cuccunelli announced the administration was proposing new immigration rules that would require prospective green card applicants to show evidence that they would not likely require government assistance at  any point in the future if they were granted foreign worker or permanent residency status.

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Child Detentions Are Part of a Terrifying Larger Plan



by

As the audio from Cuccinelli’s Tuesday morning interview hit social media channels, outrage and condemnation immediately followed.

“Cuccinelli may as well have this engraved on a plaque, hang it around his neck, and wear it for the rest of his life,” tweeted Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

Vile and un-American.

Cuccinelli is a xenophobic, anti-immigrant fringe figure who has no business being in government. He is unqualified to run USCIS and could never be confirmed.

Its clear the Trump Administration just wants to keep certain people outhttps://t.co/HM25PUnHvc

— House Homeland Security Committee (@HomelandDems) August 13, 2019

This is absurd, historically inaccurate, ableist, and shockingly devoid of humanity and compassion. Someone get this guy a history book & a heart. https://t.co/QyKK4zDRSe

— Sofi Hersher (@sof) August 13, 2019

According to CBS News, the long-anticipated policy “would require caseworkers to consider the use of government housing, food, and medical assistance such as the widely-used Section 8 housing vouchers, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Medicare’s Part D prescription drug coverage” when examining permanent residency applications.

Per NPR on Tuesday:

Welfare benefits will be just one factor that immigration service officers use to determine an applicant’s fate in the United States, in addition to age, health, education and financial status.

“If they don’t have future prospects of being legal permanent residents without welfare, that will be counted against them,” Cuccinelli said.

“All immigrants who can stand on their own two feet, self-sufficient, pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” would be welcome, he added.

As Common Dreams reporting noted Monday, immigrant rights groups that denounced the plan when it was first unveiled in September raised fresh alarm and vowed to take legal action against the Trump administration to stop the rule, which is now set to take effect in 62 days.

John Roberts’ Dark Legacy of Voter Suppression

This piece originally appeared on The Progressive. 

When Chief Justice John Roberts steps down from the Supreme Court years from now, how will he be remembered?

Many of his current admirers think (or at least hope) that it will be for defending judicial independence against the Trump Administration’s disdain for the rule of law. He did, for example, cast the deciding votes to uphold the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate in 2012 and in last year’s decision preventing the Trump Administration from adding a Census question about citizenship.

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John Roberts Is the Supreme Court’s New Swing Justice



by Bill Blum

















The Supreme Court May Be Lost for a Generation



by Bill Blum

But whatever examples there will be of Roberts serving as guardian of the third branch of government, his legacy will also have a darker side.

Among all jurists of the twenty-first century, Roberts arguably will go down as the foremost enabler of voting manipulation and voter suppression. He will be remembered for writing the 5-4 majority decision earlier this year in Rucho v. Common Cause, holding that federal courts have no jurisdiction over political gerrymandering—the practice of drawing state voting districts to benefit the political party in power.

Among all jurists of the twenty-first century, Roberts arguably will go down as the foremost enabler of voting manipulation and voter suppression.

Perhaps even more so, Roberts will be remembered for authoring the majority opinion in the 5-4 ruling that decided Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. In Shelby County, the court invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that required state and local jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with histories of egregious voter discrimination to obtain advance federal approval—known as “preclearance”—before making changes to their election procedures.

As the United States heads into the 2020 election cycle, we can expect new rounds of voter suppression, all made easier by Shelby County.

This month, the New York City-based Brennan Center for Justice released a report that found at least 17 million people were removed from state voting rolls from 2016-2018. Many, the report acknowledges, were deleted for legitimate reasons, such as moving out-of-state, or because they had died. But many others were removed as a result of faulty data collected by state agencies, or simply because they had failed to vote in previous election cycles.

Significantly, the Brennan Center found that the median purge rate in jurisdictions that were subject to VRA preclearance rules prior to Shelby County was 40 percent higher than in non-pre-clearance jurisdictions.

Purges, moreover, are just part of the suppression scourge that Shelby Countyhas aggravated. Since 2010, other suppression techniques have proliferated, including the imposition of rigid voter I.D. requirements, restrictions on registration drives and early voting, and reductions in the number of polling places, especially in red states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors, with disproportionate impacts on minority voters.

The Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, at the height of the civil rights movement. It was enacted to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and to counter the post-Reconstruction methods of black disenfranchisement that were common throughout the South in the form of poll taxes, literacy tests, “whites-only” primaries, and other repressive measures.

The VRA was immediately challenged in court by South Carolina, which was one of seven states initially covered by its preclearance procedures as a result of literacy and property-ownership tests it used to hold down African-American voter turnout. The state’s tests were suspended following the VRA’s passage, and it was precluded from amending its election laws without federal preclearance.

In one of the most important majority opinions of his storied career, South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), Chief Justice Earl Warren upheld the constitutionality of the VRA in its entirety.

In the years following Katzenbach, Congress reauthorized the VRA in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006, finding each time that the act, including the preclearance process, was needed to protect minority rights. The 2006 reauthorization, which extended the VRA for another twenty-five years, was especially emphatic, with the Senate voting to renew the legislation by a 98-0 vote, and the House by a margin of 390-33.

Shelby County, located in central Alabama, believed the preclearance requirements infringed on states’ rights. In 2008, the Justice Department refused to preclear an attempt by the city of Calera, located in the county, to redraw one of its electoral maps to decrease the percentage of black voters in the district from 70.9 percent to 29.5 percent. Two years later, the county sued former Attorney General Eric Holder on Calera’s behalf.

By the time the case reached the Supreme Court in 2013, Roberts’ negative assessment of the VRA’s preclearance requirements was well established. In 2009, in an otherwise obscure voting rights case (Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder) involving the elected board of a municipal water district in Texas, Roberts warned that unless Congress updated the formula used in the VRA to determine which jurisdictions should be subject to the preclearance process, the Supreme Court might overturn the process altogether.

Roberts’ Shelby County opinion fulfilled that warning.

Roberts’ opinion in Shelby is remarkable not only as an exercise of extreme judicial activism, but because the Chief Justice took the position that “things have changed dramatically” since passage of the VRA, and that the evils of racial discrimination in voting in the South have largely been rectified.

In reality, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissenting opinion, Congress was fully justified in reauthorizing the VRA. Between 1982 and 2006, she observed, the DOJ had blocked more than 700 proposed voting changes based on a determination the changes were discriminatory.

Roberts’ opinion in Shelby is remarkable not only as an exercise of extreme judicial activism, but because the Chief Justice took the position that the evils of racial discrimination in voting in the South have largely been rectified.

As damaging as the Shelby County ruling is, it’s important to note that the decision did not invalidate Section 2 of the VRA, which permits lawsuits to be filed by private parties to contest discriminatory voting practices. Unlike the preclearance process, however, the burden of proof in Section 2 actions falls on the victims of discrimination, not the perpetrators. So, too, do the expenses of litigation.

The federal government is also empowered to file lawsuits under Section 2 of the VRA. But to-date, the Trump Justice Department has not filed a single enforcement case. (The last federal enforcement action was initiated by the Obama Administration in January 2017, just days before Trump’s Inauguration.)

In a lengthy analysis published last year, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights decried the remedies offered by Section 2 lawsuits, concluding: “In the face of ongoing discrimination in voting procedures enacted by states across the country, enforcement and litigation under Section 2 of the VRA is an inadequate, costly, and often slow method for protecting voting rights.”

Nonetheless, around the country today, as the Brennan Center reports, a variety of plaintiffs are litigating voting rights cases in Alabama, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and several other states. Some likely will succeed, and some will fail. All will encounter uphill battles, made more uncertain and expensive by the jurisprudence of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The U.S.-Backed War on Yemen Is Collapsing

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

Yemen, a country of 28 million and one of the poorest in the world, had already become a byword for misery over the course of the last four years of war. Now, believe it or not, things have abruptly worsened.

The strategic port of Aden has fallen to southern separatists, just as it did in 1967, when the Communists took over and created the People’s Republic of South Yemen.

The Southern Transitional Council took over the strategic port of Aden with four hundred armed vehicles that had been supplied to it by the United Arab Emirates. The UAE had joined the Saudi war on Yemen after it was launched by Mohammed Bin Salman in spring of 2015. Some of the southern secessionists are ex-Communists. Some are hard line Salafi fundamentalists. The potential for religious extremism in the South is enormous.

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The Hell We've Unleashed on Yemen



by

















Everyday Americans Can Put an End to the Brutal Yemen War



by

The Saudis are now riposting against the allies of their ally. This is not about Iran but about regional power rivalry.

In essence, Yemen is now split in three, with 1) the Southern secessionists, 2) what’s left of the government of Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi, and 3) Houthi rebels in the West. There are also some areas of intense al-Qaeda and ISIL influence, in the interstices of the struggle.

The roots of southern Yemen regional patriotism go back to the early 19th century, when Britain established a garrison at Aden after Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, which had inspired fear in London that France might cut it off from the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, India. In 1839, Britain took Aden and used it as a coaling station to refuel British ships coming back and forth to India through the Red Sea. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, British vessels had a straight shot back and forth to India. But that required three further occupations—the Egyptian Suez Canal zone, Somaliland, and Aden (which ultimately became a crown colony). Aden is a base for controlling the opening to the Suez Canal, the Mandeb Straits. Britain gradually lost control through the 1960s, though, in the age of decolonization, Arab nationalism and international Communism.

Yemeni fury at being colonized helped turn Aden and the South to Communism in 1967, inasmuch as they saw that movement as less likely to try to exploit them.

When the UAE and Saudi Arabia launched their war on Yemen in 2015, the UAE cultivated the southerners and may have all along intended to break Yemen up and create a Southern client state. The UAE has been trying to recreate the 19th-century Arabian Sea empire of Oman, asserting itself in Hadramawt, Socotra, Zanzibar, Somalia, etc.

But the Yemen war turned out to be unwinnable, and Abu Dhabi is now cutting its losses and running.

The UAE has drawn down half of its land forces in Yemen (it had 5,000 to 10,000 there) and says it is getting out entirely.

These developments have left Saudi Arabia holding the bag, as Nabih Bulus and David Cloud at the LA Times explain. It hasn’t been able to dislodge the Houthis from the northwest of the country. It was backing Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who was elected president in a referendum in February 2012 after the Arab Spring unseated his predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Mansour Hadi by now has only a weak claim on legitimacy.

Now Mansour Hadi has been kicked out of his provisional capital, Aden, by the southern secessionists. They complained that he had allied with Sunni Muslim fundamentalists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood whom they view as terrorists. (Salafis in the South are a different kind of fundamentalist!)

That is the second capital Mansour Hadi has been kicked out of.

Donald Trump maintains that the Yemen war is about containing Iran, though that is a vast exaggeration. Iran is only involved with the Houthis in a relatively minor way. The U.S. Congress has voted on a bipartisan basis to halt U.S. military support for the Saudi war on Yemen, which has left millions on the verge of starvation.

Trump vetoed the congressional initiative and insists on keeping the Pentagon busy aiding the Saudi war effort.

That war effort is going nowhere, just like Trump’s politics in general, but a lot of people are getting hurt, just as with Trump’s politics in general.

 

Will India Be the Next Apartheid State?

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com. 

It has long been called the most dangerous place in the world. Still, few Americans know anything about the place; nor could they point out the troubled region of Kashmir on a map. Yet for 62 years India and Pakistan have contested for control of the province. In fact, a long-running insurgency there has even been punctuated by at least three inter-state wars between the nuclear armed powers. Now, after India recently revoked Kashmir’s “special status” – essentially annexing the disputed (and Muslim-majority) territory – there might just be another war. Tens of thousands have already been killed over the years; how many more will now die is anyone’s guess.

It’s tempting to blame the British for the whole mess. After all, like so many ongoing world conflicts, the violent struggle in Kashmir has its roots in the dissolution of venal, exploitative British Empire in the decades after World War II. Before its independence in 1947, British India – known as the raj – consisted of a massive, ethnically diverse mega-state that included the modern countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma (Myanmar). When the Brits took off, ethnic and religious tensions boiled over into a state of civil war as the raj bloodily devolved into separate Hindu and Muslim majority countries. Perhaps a million people died and fifteen million others were displaced in a tragic population swap that set a gold standard for ethnic cleansing.

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The Lethal Threat That Hangs Over India’s Reporters



by Raksha Kumar

Kashmir, meanwhile, had been contested even before partition. The Muslim-majority region was then ruled by a Hindu maharaja (local ruler). When the British pulled out, the hasty partition plan had stipulated that Kashmir could accede to either India or Pakistan. In rather undemocratic fashion, the maharaja decided to join his Hindu brethren in the state of India. War broke out, the United Nations intervened, then the UN recommended a plebiscite to allow the people of Kashmir to choose their national status. Had the election been held, the province would almost certainly have joined Pakistan. Yet neither state could settle on a demilitarization plan, no plebiscite was held, and the territory has remained divided ever since, with India in control of about two-thirds of Kashmir.

Since 1947, India – well tutored by the British, no doubt – has treated Kashmir as its own colony. It deploys more than 500,000 troops to pacify and occupy the region, in what constitutes one of the largest military deployments in the world. International human rights reports have catalogued systemic abuses by Indian military personnel including the use of excessive force on protesters, torture of prisoners, and rampant sexual violence against civilians. Pakistan, and its insurgent proxies, are, to be fair, also guilty of human rights abuses according to these reports. Nevertheless, it is India – the larger and more militarily powerful nation – that holds most of the cards, and thus responsibility.

Which brings us to the seminal, tragic, and potentially explosive recent decision by India’s Hindu-chauvinist Prime Minister Narendra Modi to unilaterally revoke Indian-occupied Kashmir’s “special status.” Though this action sounds technical and esoteric, it is actually essentially a blatant annexation of disputed and occupied territory, a clear violation of basic international law. What’s more, the revocation now allows Indian Hindus to enter and settle Kashmir in a shameless attempt to alter the religious balance in typical settler-colonial fashion. India has since sent in extra troops, declared something approaching martial law, and shut down most all communications and social media (a move disturbingly reminiscent of Egypt’s dictatorship and Saudi Arabia’s theocracy).

These are hardly acts worthy of India’s once proud status as the world’s largest democracy. That should come as little surprise. Ever since the ascension to power of Modi – who as chief minister of the province of Gujarat was complicit in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms – and his Hindu Nationalist BJP party, it is a sad fact that India’s democracy is withering away in all but name. A once proudly secular state is, like much of the world, drifting rightward and towards outright religious chauvinism.

That, then, is the truly worrying part. Set aside, for a moment, that India is one of the world’s largest (and growing) economies, and that both it and Pakistan possess sizable nuclear arsenals. That’s all disturbing and (when it comes to the nukes) enough of a worldwide existential threat. Yet seen through a broader lens, India’s drift towards hyper-nationalist and religious authoritarianism is just the latest (and biggest) part of a global trend.

Indeed India’s outright annexation of Kashmir and opening of the flood gates to ethno-religious settlement fits the model of apartheid as practiced by Israel in the West Bank and China in Tibet or its western province of Xinjiang. It’s not simply coincidental that Modi’s Hindu annexation comes right on the heels of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s threat to officially annex the occupied Palestinian West Bank to the unabashedly Jewish state of Israel. Both, of course, are flagrant violations of international law and the post-World War II Nuremberg Principles.

Men like Modi and Netanyahu both represent and use the religious, hyper-nationalist right wings of their political bases. Nevertheless, they are also tools of those extremists and liable to be lurched ever further rightward by the fervor and potentially violent threats of those core supporters. Remember, of course, that just as it was a Jewish extremist (not a Muslim Arab) that assassinated the relatively moderate Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin – probably extinguishing any hopes for peace in the Holy Land – that it was a young Hindu fanatic (not a Pakistani Muslim) that killed Mahatma Gandhi and thus any prospects for communal peace in the old raj. In fact, Gandhi’s assassin was a member of a Hindu-extremist group that preceded and has ties to Modi’s BJP.

Modi’s rise to and concentration of power is just one large part of a right-wing authoritarian and irredentist surge worldwide: from Trump in America to Bolsonaro in Brazil; from Putin in Russia to Netanyahu in Israel, among many others. The U.S. and its Western partners cry foul and openly fear China’s proposed Belt and Road initiative – an infrastructure development and investment initiative that would stretch from East to Central Asia and on to Europe – but seen in another light, it is America that is backing its own “belt” of theocrats and strongmen in the region. Specifically, the list includes, from west to east, “partners” including Egypt’s military dictatorship to the Saudi theocracy to Iraq’s Shia-chauvinist majoritarian state, and now to Modi’s Hindu-nationalist India. Such a de facto alliance hardly befits America’s proud, if self-proclaimed, status as the “leader of the free world” and global “beacon of democracy.”

Thus, when it comes to Modi’s dangerous and oppressive annexation and potential settlement of Kashmir – even with its resultant threat of conventional or nuclear war – expect Uncle Sam to remain silent. After all, President Trump admires strongmen like Modi (and Bibi and Bolsinaro and even Putin) and hasn’t shown an iota of concern for oppressed Muslims anywhere on planet Earth. So it will be only the sounds of silence that rings as India’s “democracy” proudly joins the club of native displacement and ethnic cleansing-based states formed on a settler-colonial model.

And, lest we forget, these include not only the once pariah countries of Russia and South Africa, but the “modern,” “democratic” states of Australia, Canada, Israel, and, however discomfiting: the U S of A. It’s deplorable and dangerous, what’s happening in Kashmir and within India writ large. Nonetheless, Modi and his BJP Hindu-nationalists are certainly in good company.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Racism Is Part of the New York Times’ Brand

On Aug. 3, the latest in a series of angry, young white men drove 10 hours from his home to El Paso, Texas, where he walked into a Walmart and murdered 22 people. Dozens more were injured in the killing spree. “I’m the shooter,” he said when he surrendered, subsequently telling police that he had deliberately targeted “Mexicans.” The shooter also left behind a manifesto that echoed the eugenic language of invasion and replacement used by the president of the United States. Donald Trump has since re-avowed that language, but last week he vacantly recited his lines as consoler in chief following a second mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio—a city he confused with Toledo.

The following day, The New York Times ran with the bold headline: “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.” Enough people howled online, and the front-page story was retitled “Assailing Hate But Not Guns”—a worse and even less accurate description of the president, his speech and his racist rhetoric. The paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, called it a “bad headline,” implying that it was the fault of a single headline writer and a front-page editorial process that has grown laxer in our digital age.

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3 New Studies That Will Make You Rethink Systemic Racism



by Lee Camp

A predictable critical narrative emerged, as it does every time the Gray Lady steps in it: that the paper is feckless and weak-kneed; that its desperation to appear neutral at all costs has rendered it institutionally incapable of interrogating modern conservativism. The paper, meanwhile, has repeatedly and loudly disavowed any idea that it will or even should stand up to Trump. “The biggest single mistake we could do in navigating our coverage of the Trump administration would be to let ourselves become the resistance to the government in place,” said Times national security correspondent David Sanger in 2017 at Fortune magazine’s hilariously named Brainstorm Tech Conference, in (where else?) Aspen, Colo. Shouldn’t a free press be resistant to any government in place? Don’t ask the Times.

The paper’s clubby establishmentarianism is a given at this point. It has long viewed itself as an indispensable institution, the nation’s “paper of record” and a sort of ex officio partner in government, not to a mention a permanent interlocutor for whomever happens to rule at a given time. Its private owners come from the same sort of elite private school and university milieus that produce the Brett Kavanaughs of the world: cloistered, rich, very white and very male. If you wonder why there are so many yawning, pressed-chino, conservative types in its editorial pages, it’s because the owners are those types themselves.

The educated ownership class to which the Sulzberger family belongs and to which its educated professional-class employees aspire has always had a weakness for scientific racism, though it has usually smuggled it in under the guise of hand-waving arguments about “culture.” They will tell you that the lower orders can be educated and uplifted out of their squalor, but they ultimately believe in natural hierarchies of race and gender. There’s a reason they write dozens of stories about the true-American heartland of Trump country, and it’s not out of misplaced anthropological zeal or an overcorrection for blown coverage in the run-up to 2016. The paper’s writers and editors simply believe that white people are the real Americans, particularly if they are anti-immigrant and conservative.

Over the past two weeks, deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman, a man with considerable influence over how the paper covers national politics, has twice attracted the ire of progressives online. First, he posted a tweet suggesting that Ilhan Omar (who represents Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) weren’t really Midwestern, and that Lloyd Doggett (from Texas) and John Lewis (Georgia) weren’t really from the South. He was likely attempting to point out some kind of urban-rural divide, and I am sure he imagines it is just a coincidence that three of the four people he mentioned are people of color. People steeped in racism rarely imagine that they are, themselves, racists. (The Lewis example is particularly galling; the Georgia congressman grew up in rural Alabama, the child of sharecroppers.)

Weisman deleted the tweet on the grounds that he had “failed to adequately make his point,” which is what you say when you’ve made your point all too well. But then he followed that up with a series of tweets, this time chiding left-leaning “Justice Democrats” for primarying a black congresswoman, perhaps in an effort to regain social media kudos for identity-sensitive inclusivity. This would have been paternalistic enough—black voters are not the passive recipients of racial largesse whenever Democrats deign to give them a black candidate in their districts—but it backfired even more spectacularly when the challenger, Morgan Harper, responded, “I am also black,” and Weisman, unwilling to acknowledge his initial confusion about her racial identity, replied that there was a photo in the story he’d linked.

The tweets poured in. Best-selling author Roxane Gay laid into him publicly, and the Times editor emailed her, her agent and her publisher to demand she apologize to him. Weisman again pleaded misunderstanding, claiming that he never meant to imply that Harper, on the evidence of her photo, was not black. Rather, he was saying that anyone could see she was if they just followed the link. But if that were the case, what was his point? Why criticize Justice Democrats for running a black woman against another black woman?

The answer, again, is a deep institutional conservativism. Immigrants, people of color—they should be glad to have what they do, and they should not advocate for some kind of “radical” change that will disrupt the careful balance of society. How can we have “Unity Vs. Racism” if the races will not stop antagonizing the raceless whites with their migrations, their demands for equity and access and their attempts to vote? The Times will always give Trump a certain benefit of a doubt in this regard. He is crude and not really one of them, but he is close enough, and he is doing the best he can.

Jews Join Forces to Denounce Trump’s Deportation Machine

Despite his support for Israel—which some see as a shield Donald Trump uses against accusations of anti-Semitism—progressive Jews are horrified by the president’s immigration policies, particularly those targeting undocumented immigrants. In the last month, thousands have taken to the streets, to detention centers, even to businesses they see as siding with the administration, to protest those policies. Many carry banners and chant “Never again is now,” in reference to the Holocaust.

In July, 1,000 people marched in downtown Boston, bringing rush-hour traffic to a standstill, to protest raids and deportations conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). There had been protests two days before at an immigration detention center in New Jersey, and throughout the month, additional demonstrations were staged in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Buffalo, N.Y., and at ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C.

On Sunday, 44 people were arrested while occupying a New York City Amazon bookstore, according to local television station WPIX. New York was among 50 cities with groups protesting the mega-corporation’s cooperation with ICE, through its contracts providing cloud computing and other services that enable the government agency to track down undocumented immigrants. The protesters timed the event to coincide with Tisha B’Av, a Jewish holiday of mourning and fasting, tying a historical reason for mourning—the destruction of an important temple—to one that is all too current: the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies.

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America Is on the Road to Becoming a Fascist State



by Robert Scheer

















Jewish Protest of Detention Center Leads to Mass Arrests



by

Never Again is Now, the organization that convened the latest actions, in collaboration with like-minded organizations Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and IfNotNow, is not even two months old. It started with a Facebook post from Serena Adlerstein, a 25-year-old Michigan organizer for Movimiento Cosecha, an immigrant rights group. She asked if any of her Jewish friends were interested in protesting at an ICE detention center. A week later, 36 people were arrested at a New Jersey center, according to NJ.com.

“It was kind of just this offhand Facebook post … and then people starting commenting like, ‘Yes, but actually!’” Adlerstein told BuzzFeed in July. “I think we could all sense the political moment we were in, and we were like, ‘If we’re going to actually do this, we need to do an action fairly quickly.’” Never Again is Now organized online, using such chat programs as Slack to plan and execute protests, and crowd-funding platforms to raise money for those risking arrest.

Brad Lander, a member of the New York City Council, who was among those arrested Sunday, told 972+ Magazine that “the cries of the Jewish people, of our people, against the forms of oppression visited upon us through our migrations across Jewish history, require us to speak out about what’s being done now.”

The situation at the U.S.-Mexico border and in detention centers in America have drawn comparisons to concentration camps. As BuzzFeed’s Julia Reinstein notes, “The current immigration crisis—seeing people rounded up in cages, separated from their families, humiliated by guards, and deprived of food, water, and showers—evokes a particularly painful and frightening sense of déjà vu for many Jews.”

We are at @amazon's store because @AWSCloud is vital to ICE’s cruelty.

Without Amazon, ICE cannot round immigrants up to imprison them in concentration camps or deport them. #JewsAgainstICE will not stay silent while tech companies profit off of cruelty.#NeverAgainIsNow pic.twitter.com/dhRDkjSSP7

— Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (@JFREJNYC) August 11, 2019

Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, who leads Union Temple in Brooklyn, N.Y., told 972+ that the example of young, progressive Jews led her to join the protest. “It is inspiring to see that these young Jews have so integrated our responsibility to the other, to the vulnerable, to all people who are created in the image of God, that they’re willing to put their bodies on the line.”

Never Again is Now organizers say they’re just getting started.

While dozens in New York are arrested for shutting down Amazon's store to demand they stop cooperating with ICE#JewsAgainstICE & allies risk arrest outside Howard County Detention Center in Baltimore.

This is a national movement & we're only getting stronger.#CloseTheCamps pic.twitter.com/hTwbjXbQ6D

— Never Again Action (@NeverAgainActn) August 11, 2019