Chris Hedges's Blog, page 187
August 4, 2019
Weapons of Mass Destruction: 21 Minutes, 29 Dead
It took a total of only 21 minutes for 29 people to lose their lives and at least 50 more to be wounded, many of them critically, in two mass shootings Saturday and early Sunday.
Gunmen in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, used AK-47-style assault rifles to shoot down their victims.
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In Dayton, Connor Betts, 24, killed his nine victims and injured 27 in less than a minute, according to the Dayton Daily News. “The shooter … was neutralized within a minute of the first shots being fired,” Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley said at a news conference.
In El Paso, the first 911 call was placed at 10:39 a.m. and emergency responders were on the scene at 10:45 a.m., according to ABC News. The Washington Examiner reports, “Although police would not comment on a timeline of events, the gunman reportedly began opening fire in the parking lot before walking into Walmart. Witnesses have told multiple news outlets that gunfire could be heard for up to 20 minutes.” Alleged shooter Patrick Crusius, 21, is in custody
As of Aug. 4, there had been 253 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Two hundred and seventy-two people lost their lives—67 in the last month alone. Another 1,046 have been wounded in mass shootings this year.
‘Hispanic Invasion of Texas’ Post Precedes El Paso Massacre
An anti-immigrant screed referring to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” was posted online less than 20 minutes before the first 911 calls about Saturday’s mass shooting in El Paso, The New York Times reports.
Authorities are scrutinizing the unsigned posting to determine whether it was written by shooting suspect Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old white man, who is now in custody.
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The posting outlines a plan to divide America into territories by race, and warns that white people are being replaced by foreigners, the Times reports.
Twenty people died in the El Paso shooting, including three Mexican nationals. More than two dozen were injured. The online posting specifies that Hispanics were to be targeted because they “will take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas” in a “political coup which will hasten the destruction of our country,” the Daily Mail reports.
Patrick Crusius. (FBI via AP)
Federal authorities confirmed Sunday that they were treating the massacre as an incident of domestic terrorism, Reuters reports.
The author of the 2,300-word posting notes that although the media would likely blame the shooting on Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, “My ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions … predate Trump and his campaign for president.”
But Saturday’s shooting appears to mirror a troubling trend toward nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiments worldwide. As the Times notes:
“From New Zealand to Pittsburgh to a synagogue in Poway, Calif., aggrieved white men over the last several months have turned to mass murder in service of hatred against immigrants, Jews and others they perceive as threats to the white race.”
The posting in the El Paso shooting, titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” “draws direct inspiration from the mass murder of Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand in March that left 51 people dead,” the Times reports.
“In that attack, the suspect published a manifesto online promoting a white supremacist theory called ‘the great replacement.’ The theory has been promoted by a French writer named Renaud Camus, and argues that elites in Europe have been working to replace white Europeans with immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.”
Gunman Kills His Sister, 8 Others in Dayton, Ohio
DAYTON, Ohio—A gunman in body armor opened fire early Sunday in a popular entertainment district in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine people, including his sister, and wounding dozens of others before he was quickly slain by police, city officials said.
Connor Betts, 24, was killed by police less than a minute after he started shooting a .223-caliber rifle in the streets of Dayton’s historic Oregon District about 1 a.m. in the second U.S. mass shooting in less than 24 hours. Police haven’t released further information about Betts or publicly discussed a motive.
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His 22-year-old sister Megan was the youngest of the dead — all killed in the same area of bars, restaurants and theaters that is considered a safe area downtown, police said.
Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley said the shooter was wearing body armor and had additional high-capacity magazines. Had police not responded so quickly, “hundreds of people in the Oregon District could be dead today,” she said.
Six of the nine killed were black, police said. Although they’ll investigate the possibility of a hate crime, they said the quick timing of the violence made any discrimination in the shooting seem unlikely. Police said Connor Betts, who was white, was killed in less than a minute by officers patrolling in the area.
They identified the other dead as Monica Brickhouse, 39; Nicholas Cumer, 25; Derrick Fudge, 57; Thomas McNichols, 25; Lois Oglesby, 27; Saeed Saleh, 38; Logan Turner, 30; and Beatrice N. Warren-Curtis, 36.
Whaley said at least 27 more people were treated for injuries, and at least 15 of those have been released. Several more were in serious or critical condition, hospital officials said at a news conference Sunday morning. Some suffered multiple gunshot wounds and others were injured as they fled, the officials said.
Betts was from Bellbrook, southeast of Dayton. Bellbrook Police Chief Doug Doherty said he and his officers weren’t aware of any history of violence by Betts, including during high school.
Brad Howard said he went to school with Betts and had known him for two decades.
“The Connor Betts that I knew was a nice kid,” Howard said. “The Connor Betts that I talked to I always got along with well.”
Police blocked access in Betts’ neighborhood, where neighbor Stephen Cournoyer said he often saw Betts mowing the lawn or walking the dog.
“He seemed like a good kid,” Cournoyer said. “He wasn’t a speed demon, didn’t do anything crazy. But that’s not to say, I mean, obviously he had an issue.”
Nikita Papillon, 23, was across the street at Newcom’s Tavern when the shooting started. She said she saw a girl she had talked to earlier lying outside Ned Peppers Bar.
“She had told me she liked my outfit and thought I was cute, and I told her I liked her outfit and I thought she was cute,” Papillon said. She herself had been to Ned Peppers the night before, describing it as the kind of place “where you don’t have to worry about someone shooting up the place.”
“People my age, we don’t think something like this is going to happen,” she said. “And when it happens, words can’t describe it.”
Tianycia Leonard, 28, was in the back, smoking, at Newcom’s. She heard “loud thumps” that she initially thought was someone pounding on a dumpster.
“It was so noisy, but then you could tell it was gunshots and there was a lot of rounds,” Leonard said.
Staff of an Oregon District bar called Ned Peppers said in a Facebook post that they were left shaken and confused by the shooting. The bar said a bouncer was treated for shrapnel wounds.
A message seeking further comment was left with staff.
President Donald Trump was briefed on the shooting and praised law enforcement’s speedy response in a tweet Sunday. The FBI is assisting with the investigation.
Gov. Mike DeWine visited the scene after earlier ordering that flags in Ohio remain at half-staff.
DeWine, a Republican, said policymakers must now consider: “Is there anything we can do in the future to make sure something like this does not happen?”
Both of Ohio’s two U.S. senators visited the scene of the mass shooting. Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said responding with thoughts and prayers wasn’t enough and stronger gun safety laws are needed. Republican Sen. Rob Portman said the discussion must include not just policy changes, but issues such as mental health supports.
Whaley said more than 50 other mayors also have reached out to her.
A family assistance center was set up at the Dayton Convention Center, where people seeking information on victims arrived in a steady trickle throughout the morning, many in their Sunday best, others looking bedraggled from a sleepless night. Some local pastors were on hand to offer support, as were comfort dogs.
The Ohio shooting came hours after a young man opened fire in a crowded El Paso, Texas, shopping area, leaving 20 dead and more than two dozen injured. Just days before, on July 28, a 19-year-old shot and killed three people, including two children, at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California.
Sunday’s shooting in Dayton is the 22nd mass killing of 2019 in the U.S., according to the AP/USA Today/Northeastern University mass murder database that tracks homicides where four or more people were killed — not including the offender. The 20 mass killings in the U.S. in 2019 that preceded this weekend claimed 96 lives.
Whaley said the Oregon District is expected to reopen Sunday afternoon, and a vigil is planned Sunday evening. The minor league Dayton Dragons who play in nearby Fifth Third Field postponed their Sunday afternoon game against the Lake County Captains “due to this morning’s tragic event.”
The shooting in Dayton comes after the area was heavily damaged when tornadoes swept through western Ohio in late May, destroying or damaging hundreds of homes and businesses.
“Dayton has been through a lot already this year, and I continue to be amazed by the grit and resiliency of our community,” Whaley said.
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Associated Press writers Julie Carr Smyth in Dayton, Michael Balsamo in Orlando, Fla. and Kantele Franko in Columbus contributed.
20 Dead After Gunman Attacks Texas Shoppers
EL PASO, Texas—A gunman armed with a rifle opened fire in an El Paso shopping area packed with as many as 3,000 people during the busy back-to-school season, leaving 20 dead and more than two dozen injured, police said.
Hours later, another shooting in Dayton, Ohio, claimed nine lives. That gunman was killed by police.
Authorities were investigating whether Saturday’s El Paso attack was a hate crime after the emergence of a racist, anti-immigrant screed that was posted online shortly beforehand. Detectives sought to determine if it was written by the man who was arrested. The border city has figured prominently in the immigration debate and is home to 680,000 people, most of them Latino.
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Despite initial reports of possible multiple gunmen, the man in custody was believed to be the only shooter, police said.
Two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity identified him as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius. Authorities did not release his name at a news conference but said he was arrested without police firing any shots. He is from Allen, which is a nearly 10-hour drive from El Paso.
The suspect was booked on capital murder charges, according to jail records. There was no immediate indication that he had an attorney.
Police say more than two dozen people were wounded in the attack at a shopping area about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the main border checkpoint with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Many of the victims were shot at a Walmart.
“The scene was a horrific one,” El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said, adding that many of the 26 people who were hurt had life-threatening injuries.
The shooting came less than a week after a 19-year-old gunman killed three people and injured 13 others at the popular Gilroy Garlic Festival in California before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Adriana Quezada said she was in the women’s clothing section of the Walmart with her two children when she heard gunfire.
“But I thought they were hits, like roof construction,” Quezada, 39, said of the shots.
Her 19-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son threw themselves to the ground, then ran out of the store through an emergency exit. They were not hurt, Quezada said.
Relatives said a 25-year-old woman who was shot while apparently trying to shield her 2-month-old son was among those killed, while Mexican officials said three Mexican nationals were among the dead and six more were wounded.
Ryan Mielke, a spokesman for University Medical Center of El Paso, said 13 of the wounded were brought to the hospital, including one who died. Two of the injured were children who were transferred to El Paso Children’s Hospital, he said.
Eleven other victims ages 35 to 82 were being treated at Del Sol Medical Center, hospital spokesman Victor Guerrero said.
Residents quickly volunteered to give blood to the injured. President Donald Trump tweeted: “God be with you all!”
Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, who is from El Paso and was at a candidate forum Saturday in Las Vegas, appeared shaken after receiving news of the shooting in his hometown.
He said he heard early reports that the shooter might have had a military-style weapon, saying we need to “keep that (expletive) on the battlefield. Do not bring it into our communities.”
In the document that was posted online shortly before the shooting, the writer expressed concern that an influx of Hispanics into the United States will replace aging white voters, potentially turning Texas blue in elections and swinging the White House to the Democrats.
The writer was also critical of Republicans for what he described as close ties to corporations and degradation of the environment. Though a Twitter account that appears to belong to Crusius included pro-Trump posts praising the plan to build more border wall, the writer of the online document says his views on race predated Trump’s campaign and that any attempt to blame the president for his actions was “fake news.”
Though the writer denied he was a white supremacist, the document says “race mixing” is destroying the nation and recommends dividing the United States into territorial enclaves determined by race. The first sentence of the four-page document expresses support for the man accused of killing 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in March after posting his own screed with a conspiracy theory about nonwhite migrants replacing whites.
El Paso Mayor Dee Margo said he knew the shooter was not from the city.
“It’s not what we’re about,” the mayor said at the news conference with Gov. Greg Abbott and the police chief.
In the hours after the shooting, authorities blocked streets near a home in Allen associated with the suspect. Officers appeared to speak briefly with a woman who answered the door of the gray stone house and later entered the residence.
El Paso County is more than 80% Latino, according to the latest census data. Tens of thousands of Mexicans legally cross the border each day to work and shop in the city.
Trump visited in February to argue that walling off the southern border would make the U.S. safer, while city residents and O’Rourke led thousands on a protest march past the barrier of barbed wire-topped fencing and towering metal slats.
O’Rourke stressed that border walls have not made his hometown safer. The city’s murder rate was less than half the national average in 2005, the year before the start of its border fence. Before the wall project started, El Paso had been rated one of the three safest major U.S. cities going back to 1997.
Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said the El Paso suspect was not on her group’s radar. “We had nothing in our files on him,” Beirich wrote in an email.
The shooting was the 21st mass killing in the United States in 2019, and the fifth public mass shooting. Before Saturday, 96 people had died in mass killings in 2019 — 26 of them in public mass shootings.
The AP/USATODAY/Northeastern University mass murder database tracks all U.S. homicides since 2006 involving four or more people killed, not including the offender, over a short period of time regardless of weapon, location, victim-offender relationship or motive. The database shows that the median age of a public mass shooter is 28, significantly lower than the median age of a person who commits a mass shooting of his family.
Since 2006, 11 mass shootings — not including Saturday’s — have been committed by men who are 21 or younger.
___
Balsamo reported from Orlando, Florida, and Heidgerd from Dallas. Associated Press writers Martha Irvine in Chicago; Eric Tucker and Michael Biesecker in Washington, D.C.; Michael Kunzelman in Silver Spring, Maryland; Michelle L. Price in Las Vegas; Jeff Karoub in Detroit; and Jake Bleiberg in Allen, Texas, contributed. AP data editor Meghan Hoyer also reported from Washington, D.C.
2 Mass Shootings in Less Than 24 Hours Shock the Nation
Two mass shootings at crowded public places in Texas and Ohio claimed at least 29 lives in less than 24 hours and left scores of people wounded, a shocking carnage even in a country accustomed to gun violence.
In the Texas border city of El Paso, a gunman opened fire Saturday morning in a shopping area packed with thousands of people during the busy back-to-school season. The attack killed 20 and wounded more than two dozen, many of them critically.
Hours later in Dayton, Ohio, a gunman wearing body armor and carrying extra magazines opened fire in a popular nightlife area, killing nine and injuring at least 26 people. The suspected shooter was shot to death by responding officers.
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The attacks came less than a week after a 19-year-old gunman killed three people and injured 13 others at the popular Gilroy Garlic Festival in California before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The El Paso shooting was being investigated as a possible hate crime as authorities worked to confirm whether a racist, anti-immigrant screed posted online shortly beforehand was written by the man arrested. The border city is home to 680,000 people, many of them Latino.
El Paso authorities offered few details about the assault, but Police Chief Greg Allen described the scene as “horrific” and said many of the 26 people who were hurt had life-threatening injuries.
In Dayton, the bloodshed was likely limited by the swift police response. Officers patrolling the area responded in less than a minute to the shooting, which unfolded around 1 a.m. on the streets of the downtown Oregon District, Mayor Nan Whaley said.
Had police not responded so quickly, “hundreds of people in the Oregon District could be dead today,” Whaley said.
El Paso Mayor Dee Margo said he knew the shooter was not from his city.
“It’s not what we’re about,” the mayor said at the news conference with Gov. Greg Abbott and the police chief.
Two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity identified the El Paso suspect as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius from Allen, which is a nearly 10-hour drive from El Paso.
Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, who is from El Paso and was at a candidate forum Saturday in Las Vegas, appeared shaken after receiving news of the shooting in his hometown.
He said he heard early reports that the shooter might have had a military-style weapon, saying we need to “keep that (expletive) on the battlefield. Do not bring it into our communities.”
The shootings were the 21st and 22nd mass killings of 2019 in the U.S., according to the AP/USA Today/Northeastern University mass murder database that tracks homicides where four or more people killed — not including the offender.
Including the two latest attacks, 125 people had been killed in the 2019 shootings.
August 2, 2019
As Ilhan Omar Said, Trump Is a Fascist
This article was originally published on Truthout.
After Donald Trump accused Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of “trafficking in vicious anti-Semitic screeds” at a rally in North Carolina, the crowd erupted in the chant “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!” Trump later claimed he did not agree with the chants and that he had tried to cut them short. A tape of the event, however, makes clear that this was a lie. Moreover, Trump refused to retract the racist tweets that set in motion this frenzied mass expression of racism by renewing his call for the four Congresswomen he attacked to leave the country if they do not embrace his worldview of patriotism and American exceptionalism. In fact, he mentioned to reporters that he was “enjoying” the latest controversy over his comments, which have drawn international condemnation.” This was a spectacle that had the markings not only of a current white nationalist rally but also echoes of the hate-filled spectacles that took place in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and 1940s.
It is both strange and disconcerting that almost none of the mainstream reporting on Trump’s rally examined its clear similarities with staged rallies in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Much like Nazi rallies, Trump’s rallies seek to turn politics into a grandiose theater of nativism, while presenting the head of state as a kind of demigod. In addition, there is the preaching of hate, which functions as a kind of quasi-religious experience used to trade off and amplify mass anger largely directed at those considered the enemies of the state — in this case women of color who are criminalized by virtue of their political beliefs, race and ethnicity. Seizing upon the potentially violent energy of his followers, Trump transforms their heightened anxieties and collective fears into a mass disdain for Muslims, immigrants, Black people and others.
Trump’s manipulation of the crowds at his rallies brings to mind French reactionary theorist Gustave Le Bon’s depiction of crowds as governed by “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit [and] the exaggeration of the sentiments” — a depiction that Hitler read and was inspired by.
Such expressions of hate and racial cleansing are about more than the privileging of fear and emotion over reason. They also constitute an updated version of a mob frenzy that encourages its participants to take pleasure in demonizing others. This “politics of the spectacle” reinforces the social emptiness at the heart of neoliberal societies, filling it with fear, illusion and endless nativist and racist rants while offering the immediate gratification of misdirected pleasure. Trump’s spectacles of fear and racism portray politics as pure theater mediated through the elemental forces of hatred, bigotry and the triumph of power.
In her chapter on “The Drama of Illumination,” in the anthology on Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich, art history scholar Kathleen James-Chakraborty describes how Nazi rallies used public spectacles to unify Nazi supporters around policies that demonized socialists, gays, communists and Jews, all the while drawing attention away from unjust economic and social issues. She writes:
The ingredients of Nazi spectacle may have been familiar, but the degree to which they were now injected into the daily lives of millions of Germans was certainly unprecedented. So was the degree to which they were intended to promise blind obedience to the authoritarian state. Such spectacles could only work if they were comprehensible and thus potentially appealing to the masses upon whose support the ostensible legitimacy of the state depended.
The fascist spectacle echoed a totalitarian logic in which desire became a target of politics. As Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi wrote in Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, the relationship between fantasy and agency in these spectacles was reconfigured to produce “the prevalence of the senses over sprit, self-abandonment, and the release of passion.” Culture was transformed into a pedagogical practice of disruption, a pedagogical vehicle used to unleash the collective passions of abhorrence, loathing and cruelty.
The most sinister elements of the fascist spectacle are at work in Trump’s mobilization of a toxic populism. As politics scholar John Keane points out in The Conversation, this is a populism that in the name of an imagined people necessitates “demagogic leadership” and “encourages attacks on independent media, expertise, rule-of-law judiciaries” and other institutions designed to hold power accountable. Trump’s manipulation of his followers feeds upon a right-wing populism that uses the logic of disposability as a driving force of social abandonment and machinery of social death. This populism thrives on the energies of the dead.
Trump’s appropriation of right-wing populism as a tactical weapon is evident in his attack on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan (collectively known as “the Squad.” Such attacks are part of a spectacle of toxic masculine power that encourages the subordination of women to men, seeks to turn people into dehumanized objects, and transforms intellectual complexities into the quick fix of an emotional discharge. For Trump, shock becomes his mode of address, designed to titillate his adoring fans while using theater as a politics of diversion. Trump’s racism, his demonizing of others and his call to suppress dissent makes the appeal to violence a legitimating tool of state terrorism. At the same time, Trump’s rallies — like the Nuremberg rallies in Nazi Germany — not only appeal to the registers of emotion over reason but also mystify power and embrace dystopian notions of the state in an aesthetic that cinema scholar Lutz Koepnick describes in his essay “Rethinking the Spectacle” as working to “bond the individual to a charismatic project of national rebirth and pure politics.”
Trump’s rallies pathologize politics by promoting a culture of fear that reverses the process of identification from compassion for the other to a feral hatred and contempt. At the same time, Trump’s spectacles while appealing to his base could not succeed without the presence of the conservative media ecosystem and a mainstream press that serves largely to heighten the effects of the Trump media show. Moreover, a number of commentators and almost no Republicans have condemned Trump’s overt racism. In this scenario, there are few moments of profane illumination or self-reflection, except for the way such events are taken up in the alternative media.
We have arrived at a historical moment when the interface of violence, fear, racism and new technologies are strengthening and mobilizing a political formation steeped in a species of white nationalism. This formation turns fear and the pleasure of humiliation into the immediacy of a spectacle that delivers the fantasy of collective revenge as a central part of presidential power and electioneering. Let’s be clear. At the heart of Trump’s rallies is a manufactured pageant that trades in violence, cruelty, humiliation and domination as part of his campaign of terror that makes the elemental structures of a democracy and the social sphere dysfunctional. Trump’s spectacle operates off of fear rather than persuasion and, in doing so, reinforces the ominous anti-intellectual forces that drive his presidency.
Trump unapologetically operates on the assumption that only white people can be citizens — a belief that Ishaan Tharoor argues is a cornerstone of white nationalism. By politicizing racial taunts and reinforcing the assumption that citizenship is the exclusive terrain of whites, Trump turns politics into part of a war culture that trades in divisiveness and friend/enemy divides. What is clear is that Trump’s rallies echo a fascist past that uses racism and nativist narratives of racial purity as a form of mass entertainment. Trump’s rallies thus make clear that politics has degenerated into a war on justice and any vestige of democracy. Moreover, Trump has given further legitimation to what has become a global phenomenon of right-wing populism, which as Agnes Heller has written, is “the transformation of class to a mass society.” That is, class is no longer defined in terms of inequalities in wealth, power and resources, but as a generalized mass no longer defined by the boundaries of popular sovereignty and an insurgent collective resistance but by the need to transfer power to a leader who speaks and acts on behalf of the multitude.
What we are witnessing at the current historical moment is an acceleration of racial politics and the politics of terminal exclusion, wrapped up in the mass marketing of rage and anger. Language has degenerated into an educational and political project for reinforcing the currency of white supremacy through what Paul Gilroy describes in Against Race as the affective registers of “romance, pleasure, and fantasy.” In Trump’s rallies, we find a spectacle rich with the thrill of what economist Calvin Hoover in 1933 called “a sugar-coated terror,” carefully staged in the service of an emotionally charged rhetoric that affirmed a culture of cruelty. In this aestheticization of politics is a fascist principle wedded to producing what Étienne Balibar calls “death zones of humanity.” These “death zones” (where people become silenced, unknowable, and lack human rights) take the form of borders, detention centers and dead spaces of terminal exclusion — wrapped up in spectacles and political pageants that call for the elimination of those individuals and groups seen as a threat to the ideology of white nationalism.
Trump has a predatory instinct for mobilizing hatred and whipping up a regressive release of mass emotions in which a narrow Nazi-style “blood and soil” ethos replaces humanitarian ways of being. This is a discourse that puts the meaning of justice, identity and citizenship on trial and could lead eventually to the imprisoning and killing of those deemed enemies of the people.
Trump’s presidency reinforces an unchecked racism and nativism through conservative and mainstream cultural apparatuses and pedagogical practices that further normalize a right-wing populism and enhance the global standing of authoritarianism. The public sphere is now saturated with spectacles of violence, thoughtlessness and a mind-numbing anti-intellectualism. At work here is an ongoing project to transform culture into a theatrical performance, while quickening, without apology, a fascist politics that has now become a central element of governance.
Rather than kill democracy through a military coup or a show of state force, Trump eviscerates democracy through a cultural politics that hollows out and destroys those institutions that produce critically engaged citizens. This is a soft form of fascism, rooted in modes of identification, desire and agency that offer the public unity defined through what Los Angeles Review of Books contributor Anya Ventura describes as “a separatist politics that relied on strict categories of identity.” Or more specifically, a separatist politics rooted in the divisive lens of white supremacy and the hatred of democracy.
At stake here is not just a political crisis but also a cultural crisis resulting in what architect and theorist Teddy Cruz describes in Living as Form as “the inability of institutions to question their ways of thinking … the rigidity of their protocols and silos.” Trump’s aestheticization of politics aims largely to eliminate those formative cultures that create the habits and dispositions upon which a democracy’s survival depends.
In this media-fabricated ecosystem, agency can only find its purpose and meaning in the coordinates of hate and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Under Trump, reality has become a toxic melodrama played out through a relentless display of hypermasculinity, ultranationalism and a culture of utter cruelty that accelerates the death of the unwanted.
White nationalism is now being delivered nationally via emotional taunts parading as spectacle, entertainment and manufactured drama. The making of politics as theater opens up a new connection between contemporary fascist politics and a fascist past. Ilhan Omar was right in calling Trump a fascist.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape
“Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo”
A book by Mithu Sanyal
Mithu Sanyal’s “Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo” is a book about what we talk about when we talk about rape and how we talk about rape. Sanyal tackles some thorny questions, among them the sensationalism that surrounds rape, the pressures we place on victims to speak out, and our dominant narrative of female sexual victimization. Her work is meticulous and stands on the shoulders of second-wave giants such as Susan Brownmiller and Susan Griffin, who argued that rape is not sex, but violence. This is such an established concept today that it is hard for younger people to fathom its significance back in the 1970s. But when Brownmiller’s “Against Our Will” (1975) asserted that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” it was a major discursive turning point. Likewise, with Griffin’s thesis, rape is “an act of aggression in which the victim is denied her self-determination.” Griffin was writing in an essay entitled “Rape: The All-American Crime,” published in 1971, and went on to publish a book-length study of the issue, entitled “Rape: The Power of Consciousness,” in 1979. It is obvious from its title that Sanyal’s book is being pitched both as a reprise of this work and a survey of the intervening years. (She is also heavily indebted to Joanna Bourke’s more contemporary and similarly entitled “Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present.”) Where Sanyal covers new ground is in examining the evolution of rape discourse itself and questioning how far it has come.
Click here to read long excerpts from “Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo” at Google Books.
To this end, Sanyal gives us a potted judicial history of the crime: how it is defined, how it is criminalized—in short, what rape has really been about over the years. In the Hammurabi Code, for example, it is defined as theft of virginity, the only thing by which a woman can be defined in society. But to think of rape as the theft of the woman’s virginity would be naive. Virginity did not (has not until very recently and still does not in many places around the world) belong to the woman, but rather to her husband or father. Rape in this period is therefore a homosocial act, one committed by one man against another through the conduit of a woman—as illustrated by the fact that in Assyria, the punishment for rape was for the perpetrator to hand over his wife to the raped woman’s father (an eye for an eye). Its homosocial nature is further understood if seen alongside adultery, an antiquated phrase for which highlights the relationship between both male parties: Man 1 cuckolds Man 2 by having sex with Man 2’s wife. “Wife” is the crucial part of the equation, but absent from the phrasing: the means but not the end. In the case of rape, it is Man 2 who is absent from the phrasing, but no less a victim of the act.
Rape’s categorization alongside adultery appears again in 13th-century Britain. In the Statutes of Westminster, both are considered crimes against the social order. By the statutes’ logic, all sexual acts unconducive to reproduction within wedlock (adultery, homosexual sex, masturbation, and rape) become crimes against “public decency,” and perversions of the state’s desired course of civilian life as a life plot that moves rapidly toward the culmination of marriage and babies. In Germany, an almost identical definition of public decency is made law in 1871, when Germany first becomes a unified country. This is noteworthy, in that it highlights how much the “wrong” sex is a source of anxiety for a nascent nation-state. That this legal codification crops up in the separate contexts of 1275 England and 1871 Germany is revealing. It means our perception of rape has stagnated for long periods of history.
Eventually, we came to the modern understanding of rape, which Sanyal asserts, “is rooted in the European Enlightenment and Western liberalism, and thereby based in the idea of property—just as the original understanding of rape was.” Specifically, she cites property in the Lockean sense: “Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself.” Our perception of female personhood may have greatly improved, therefore, but rape’s dialectic of ownership has remained in place since 4000 BCE. At present, this takes shape in an “antagonistic and gendered giver-receiver model,” wherein the receiver of consent (imagined as male) has to ask, and the giver (imagined as female) is supposed to say yes or no. In the words of sex educator Rona Torenz: “That is not a good model for relationships, sexual or otherwise.”
Not only that, but our understanding of rape’s aftermath has not changed as much as we might think. Though we have come astonishingly far in very little time, we find ourselves in a moment where there is a great deal of pressure on victims to speak out. It goes without saying that such sensitive story-sharing is enormously powerful and provided the basis of women’s liberation movements from a near-half-century ago. More recently, hashtag-led movements such as #YesAllWomen and #MeToo have provided the “empowerment by empathy” cited by Tarana Burke. The grassroots story-sharing of last year’s Irish campaign to repeal the eighth amendment #InHerShoes saw thousands of the country’s recent diaspora flying home to vote, swing the referendum, and thereby defeat one of the world’s most powerful para-political organizations, the Catholic Church.
But this is a tactic we have had for a very long time. In making story-sharing the primary recourse of survivors, we run the risk of retraumatizing those who may not wish to reexcavate their experience in public. Furthermore, the recollection of one’s own experience of sexual violence has become so established in explorations of the subject, that it verges on set piece, as if trauma were a sole conveyor of authority on the subject. In making it the standard peg of discussion, we run the risk of becoming consumer-recipients hankering for female pain, unable to move past the immediate identification with an individual. Mychal Denzel Smith writes about a parallel phenomenon in his essay “The Gatekeepers: On the burden of the black public intellectual,” examining the discourse surrounding the fight for black lives:
[T]he black public intellectual, so defined, is largely responsible for defenses and explanations of black culture, or for arguing in favor of black people’s humanity and right to life, for a white audience. This necessarily constricts the questions we are able to ask and degrades the level of discourse. Consider the amount of energy expended by black writers and pundits defending the character of victims of police violence. To participate in this dialogue requires an excavation of black pain for the consumption of a white public; it takes up space that could otherwise be used to consider the function of policing or the root causes of racist violence. It leaves no room for new ideas or even real debate. […] White people assign the stories, produce the television segments, and book the radio guests, and they seek out narrative structures they understand. They call upon black public intellectuals to speak to the tragedy of black lives defined by violence, or to make sense of black cultural trends, while diverting attention and energy away from more challenging work that is often relegated to smaller platforms. […] As a writer, I have spent more time asking white people to see me as human than I have thinking about the world I would like to live in.
Similarly, women have spent decades arguing that rape is violent, traumatic, and banal. As with the humanity of black lives, we have spent far too long stuck making obvious assertions, and not enough imagining the world we would like to live in, and how we get there.
The pressure to reminisce on one’s own trauma is also to fall back into the trope of the fallen woman who is publicly defined by the harm done to her, a tendency that has repercussions for our understanding of female sexuality. “In my political writing, I found out, it was easier to talk about being raped, than to talk about all the positive sexual experience that I have had,” Sanyal writes, ruefully. “When breaking the silence is taken up as the necessary route to recovery or as a privileged political tactic, it becomes a coercive imperative on survivors to confess.” And we have failed to bring our expectations of trauma with us, even as we make vast strides in convincing people how common rape is. Megan Nolan of the New Statesman writes that rape is “perceived as a singular crime of life-ruining magnitude (which, of course, it may be)—and yet it is also common as muck.” Sanyal corroborates, quoting Samantha Geimer: “You don’t have to fall apart to show that what happened to you was wrong.” To place such emphasis on public discussion of rape is to render female sexuality an externally defined thing, and often in painful terms.
What is most noteworthy about the evolution of rape’s criminalization is that we have moved from a communal definition of rape to one that’s more centered on the individual; from a rupture in the social fabric to a psychic wound in the victim themselves. As we have shed both pre-Enlightenment notions of the body politic and pre–Gay Liberation notions of public decency, we have redefined the individual in more narrow terms. We place discomfiting emphasis on the individual as an individual body, and not the responsibilities it may bear to others, or legislative, judicial, and political bodies. This is part of a dominant neoliberal ideology which seeks to deny the interactions between phenomena—be that inequality and sexuality, or a living wage and the opportunity for full sexual self-determination—and suppresses how subjects shape the state.
Sanyal addresses this in one of her closing points. Referring to countries outside of our Western (neoliberal) gaze, she cites the Minangkabau in West Sumatra, to whom rape is “hardly know[n].” By comparison, rape in the US prison system is “unimaginably common.” The more equal a society, she ventures, “and the higher its opportunities for participation, the lower its rape rate.” That this crime which has been embedded in our societies forever could be greatly diminished by expanding the opportunities to engage in society is certainly an appealing proposition. It is a shame that Sanyal does not give herself the room to explore quite how, but she has given us a survey of an issue at the heart of how we live with one another in the here and now.
This review originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books .
Plastic-Bottle Sales Banned at San Francisco Airport
SAN FRANCISCO—San Francisco International Airport is banning the sale of single-use plastic water bottles.
The unprecedented move at one of the major airports in the country will take effect Aug. 20, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday.
The new rule will apply to airport restaurants, cafes and vending machines. Travelers who need plain water will have to buy refillable aluminum or glass bottles if they don’t bring their own.
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As a department of San Francisco’s municipal government, the airport is following an ordinance approved in 2014 banning the sale of plastic water bottles on city-owned property.
The shift away from plastics is also part of a broader plan to slash net carbon emissions and energy use to zero and eliminate most landfill waste by 2021, said airport spokesman Doug Yakel.
But, considering the approximately 4 million plastic water bottles sold per year at the airport, it may be more difficult for vendors to adhere to the water bottle ban.
Whether vendors out of compliance will be penalized is unclear, but Yakel said the airport hopes that “won’t be necessary.”
SFO vendors already are required to provide only compostable single-use foodware, including to-go containers, condiment packets, straws and utensils.
Shops at the airports have adjusted easily to these requirements because of the increased availability of suppliers producing such products, said Michael Levine, CEO of the company that oversees Napa Farms Market, a store selling grab-and-go fare in Terminal 2 and International Terminal G.
“But the water bottle impact is a little trickier,” he said.
In ‘Midsommar,’ Silent White Supremacy Shrieks Volumes
Warning: Spoilers abound.
“Midsommar” might just be the movie of the summer. Writer-director Ari Aster’s visually stunning day-lit nightmare follows four Americans on a journey to a pagan commune in rural Sweden as they observe a summer solstice festival replete with ritual human sacrifice.
Viewers are lining up in droves to take the trip with them. Whether in online forums or in bars and cafes catering to the intellectual and artistic in cities like Los Angeles and New York, people can’t seem to stop talking about this beautiful and sinister tale of grief, breakups and murder.
Yet in the dozens of reviews about the film, few have acknowledged or appear to have even noticed that the world of the Hårga—the Scandinavian cult at the center of the film—is a white supremacist’s wet dream. Based on mostly overlooked comments by Aster, the film may even intentionally be a satire of the neo-pagan and anti-immigrant teachings employed by some on the far right.
From the moment Mark (the fool, played by “The Revenant” actor Will Poulter), Christian (the clueless boyfriend, portrayed by Jack Reynor of “On the Basis of Sex”), Josh (the obsessive anthropology student depicted with typical flair by William Harper Jackson of “The Good Place”) and Dani (the film’s anti-heroine and eventual May queen, played by newcomer Florence Pugh) enter Hårga’s runic sun gate, whiteness envelops the screen. As noted by Pelle, the commune-raised foreign exchange student who brought the Americans to the village, we are now in the land of the midnight sun.
From the dizzying and near-perpetual sunlight to the clothes worn by the Hårga, whiteness symbolizes the unity of the cult. Color, on the clothes of the outsiders and especially on the skin of Josh and British visitors Connie (played by Ellora Torchia) and Simon (Archie Madekwe), is an instant visual cue of otherness.
As the director pointed out in an interview with the New York Daily News, the Hårga’s treatment of the film’s characters of color stems from their racism.
Josh is not the first person to be killed off, seemingly subverting the “black guy dies first” trope, as the Daily News notes. But Simon, a black (albeit lighter-skinned) British friend brought to the commune by Pelle’s brother Ingemar, is the first character killed. He’s soon followed by Connie, his fiancée.
These outsiders, viewers learn, are brought to the Hårga for the purposes of mating and/or sacrificing. The way recruits are chosen for these roles, Aster reveals in his Daily News interview, is also a callback to “a part of Swedish history and European history” that is explicitly racist. The director adds that the Hårga only recruit white people as “new blood” for the cult.
Josh, Aster says, is “thrown away in a way that the other members of the main cast are not. And that is because these people have no further use for him.”
Perhaps the most overt admission of racism in “Midsommar” comes as something of an aside, just before the climactic maypole dance competition that leads to Dani’s crowning as the May queen.
As a red-cheeked and rotund Hårga woman explains to the assembled crowd in Swedish, the commune observes the maypole dance tradition during its midsommar festivities to spite “the Black One,” who, some time in the distant past, put a spell on the women that caused them to dance in a frenzy until they died. The explanation provides a rare glimpse into the cult’s dogma, and although this “Black One” is, presumably, an allusion to a devil or demon, it sounds particularly harsh and bigoted in the guttural Swedish of this white linen-clad milkmaid.
Josh, as the darkest-skinned of the cast, is indeed scapegoated after being murdered when he was caught in the act of taking forbidden photos of the cult’s sacred runic text. To explain his disappearance, an elder tells commune members that their holy book is missing. He implies that the culprit was either Josh or Mark (the laconic white jokester of the American bunch, who is seduced by a Hårga girl, possibly for the purpose of inseminating her, then killed and skinned). Christian, clearly on his way to indoctrination, throws Josh under the bus—a move the elders are more than happy to exploit.
Were it just the mistreatment of the black and brown characters and weird dark-skinned devil imagery in the Hårga’s mythology, it would be easy enough to write off the cult’s racism as a sign that it bought into an antiquated European obsession with purity. It enters full-on white supremacist territory, however, when it comes to the basis of the Hårga’s strange breath-language and the markings around their village—Nordic runes.
Any metal fan or researcher specializing in hate groups can tell you that there is a specific subset of neo-Nazis in both Europe and North America who are utterly obsessed with Nordic mythology. Odin, the Zeus-like king of the Nordic pantheon, is popularly co-opted by such white supremacist groups as the Soldiers of Odin, and many modern neo-Nazis practice perverted Norse religions that use the hammer of Thor as an identifying symbol.
Be it the black sun rune popularized by pre-World War II Nazis (and seen on shields at the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.) or the Othala, or Odal, rune that’s used for everything from white supremacist tattoos to group logos, it’s impossible to watch “Midsommar” with an understanding of Nazi runic obsession and believe it was unintentionally incorporated into the film. Indeed, the half-sun gate at the entrance to the commune’s compound resembles the black sun rune, and the Odal is seen on at least one item of Hårga clothing.
It must be noted that the Hårga recruitment and sacrifice scheme is an inversion of the classic anti-immigrant argument employed by white nationalists—instead of trying to keep the dark-skinned Other out, the cult deliberately brings people in. Of course, its motives are less than liberal.
Josh, as the scapegoat and sacrificial victim, represents another subversion of the racist trope that paints people of other races as unwilling to assimilate. He, more than any other member of his travel party, is fascinated by the Hårga—so much so that he intends to incorporate them into his thesis on European midsummer traditions.
Need further proof that the film is a deliberate callback to and satire of the world white supremacists want? Look no further than its reception from white supremacists themselves.
“Oh look,” white nationalist Lana Lokteff tweeted soon after the trailer for the film was released in March. “A horrible film demonizing an ancient Swedish/European tradition where pretty peaceful Swedes are racist killers. Edgy stuff.”
“How about a film in Israel showing the horror of an Orthodox Jewish tradition, Ari Aster,” she added, a probable reference to the director’s Jewish background. “No surprise Ari made a film about incest too. Sick mind.”
Oh look a horrible film demonizing an ancient Swedish/European tradition where pretty peaceful Swedes are racist killers. Edgy stuff.
How about a film in Israel showing the horror of an Orthodox Jewish tradition, Ari Aster. No surprise Ari made a film about incest too. Sick mind. https://t.co/OGtBaMJMs6
— Lana (@LanaLokteff) March 8, 2019
Henrik Palmgren, Lokteff’s Swedish-born husband, also had a lot to say about “Midsommar” depiction of rituals in his home country.
As noted by Angry White Men, a blog dedicated to tracking white nationalist and white supremacist internet personalities, Palmgren complained on the vlog he shares with Lokteff that the film is “clearly a hate movie” that represents “racial discrimination against people of—especially Nordic heritage, but white people in general.”
After an anti-Semitic diatribe in which he complains that Aster is creating “propaganda,” the host bizarrely claims that the portrayal of Swedes in the film are worse than caricatures of Jews published by the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
From Aster’s comments about Hårga racism to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it inclusion of a book titled “The Secret Nazi Language of the Uthark” before the group sets off for Sweden, “Midsommar” includes far too many neo-Nazi Easter eggs for the apparent racist allegory to be coincidental.
As The Stranger reviewer Joule Zelman writes, “While the Swedish cultists—who all learn a runic language as children—aren’t necessarily white supremacists, it’s not a stretch to view ‘Midsommar’ as a warning.”
America Has Gulags in Its Own Backyard
Plucking chickens for for-profit companies, caring for elderly patients without any training, and other forms of hard, uncompensated labor are sanctioned in the United States as court-mandated rehabilitation for drug-related charges. As the deficit of rehab care in the U.S. grew during the far-reaching opioids crisis over recent years, what are essentially work camps—where detainees work for no money or face prison time, despite often not even being convicted of a crime—started to pop up all over the country.
In a hard-hitting series for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, investigative journalist Shoshana Walter details the shocking discoveries she and her former Reveal colleague Amy Julia Harris, now at The New York Times, made as they investigated long-term residential treatment programs in which recovering addicts worked for such employers as Exxon, Shell and Walmart—and received no pay.
Their work was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, won numerous major journalism prizes and led to government investigations, two criminal probes and five federal class-action lawsuits alleging slavery, labor violations and fraud.
“Most people who need addiction treatment can’t get it,” Walter tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “So that just led me to question: If there’s a treatment shortage, where are these defendants being sent? And what we found is that judges all over the country are oftentimes sending people who face very low-level charges and crimes to these long-term residential treatment programs that claim to provide rehabilitation, but in reality all they are are work camps for private companies and industries.”
The journalists’ investigation led them from Oklahoma to North Carolina and other places, where they found stories about different forms these programs take in several states, depending on the regulation, which varied significantly from place to place. Scheer highlights how these programs are in direct violation of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, as Walter repeatedly found throughout her reporting.
“We forget the founders faced a situation in society where we had a lot of people who were held in the stockade or something, because ‘Oh, you violated the terms of your employment,’ or what have you,” Scheer says. “So tell us about the 13th Amendment and how it applies to your series, because it keeps coming up.”
“The 13th Amendment,” Walter explains, “basically outlawed slavery in the United States. And it states that involuntary servitude is not OK, except essentially as a punishment upon conviction of a crime. So, when you have participants who are getting sent by courts to these programs, ostensibly for rehab and treatment for their addictions, what lawyers have told us is there’s an argument that that violates the 13th Amendment. Because not only sometimes are there no convictions in these cases yet, but a lot of the time, even if there are convictions, the courts are saying: This is not for punishment. This is to rehabilitate you. This is to provide treatment so that you can recover from your addictions and become a productive member of society.”
Perhaps most egregious is the fact that these programs not only do not lead to rehabilitation, but more often lead to drug use relapses, untreated injuries, abuse and mistreatment, prison time and, in the worst cases, suicide. In the wealthiest country in the modern world, these programs are a clear example of how, when left unchecked, many American companies seem happy to use exploited labor to turn obscene profits, despite the moral questions these centers clearly pose. And to add insult to injury, as Scheer points out, the industries profiting from these abusive practices even “give themselves awards for their prison rehabilitation work.”
Listen to Scheer and Walter discuss the sordid American work camps that pass for rehab centers and what regulators have failed to do—as well as what they could do in the future. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.
Introduction by Natasha Hakimi-Zapata
Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to say the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Shoshana Walter, who’s at Reveal, the radio program of the Center for Investigative Reporting. And has, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a great series that she did with Amy Julia Harris, “All Work. No Pay.” And it’s all about the misuse of rehab programs; we’ll get into the detail, but basically providing, if not slave labor, certainly the sort of labor denied by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was aimed at indentured servitude and so forth. And so I want to start with this series that you did with Amy Julia Harris, who is, I gather, at the New York Times now.
Shoshana Walter: Yes.
RS: And what is terrific about it is it’s basically about good intentions gone awry, or the pretense of good intentions. In this case there’s been a movement, a good movement, to figure out an alternative to jails, to prisons. And rehab, and being serious about it. Part of it has been informed by some notion of Christian charity and religion and so forth. It’s been quite popular in the South as an alternative. And you know, it sounds good. But what your articles, this series that made you a Pulitzer Prize finalist–and the reporting was done during 2017 and somewhat into the year 2018–was basically about these judges just sending people off to a program for a year, under the penalty you’re going to be sent back to prison if you complain, or you don’t work through injury and other things. And really describing barbaric treatment of a workforce–now, we’re not talking about China, now; we get a lot of stuff about the labor force in China. We’re talking about here, Louisiana, Texas, and so forth. You’re talking about people producing items for Walmart. You’re talking about Tyson poultry, the biggest poultry in the country. You’re talking about Shell and Exxon oil companies. So, lay it out. What did you find, and you know, how did you get the story?
SW: Yeah. Well, the project began with my editor approaching me and my colleague to find an investigative story about state courts. And so what I really started doing is looking at drug courts and other types of diversion court programs that are increasingly popular now as alternatives to incarceration for drug defendants and low-level offenders. And looking at where courts were sending people for treatment, because there’s a huge treatment shortage, addiction treatment shortage in this country that’s well known. Most people who need addiction treatment can’t get it. And so that just led me to question, if there’s a treatment shortage, where are these defendants being sent? And what we found is that judges all over the country are oftentimes sending people who face very low-level charges and crimes to these long-term residential treatment programs that claim to provide rehabilitation, but in reality all they are are work camps for private companies and industries. So the first story that we did looked at a program called Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery. It’s in Jay, Oklahoma, which is a really, really rural part of Oklahoma, very close to the Missouri border. And this program was founded by a poultry industry executive who actually was having difficulty staffing her overnight shifts at this chicken plant with paid workers. So ultimately, she ended up creating her own program, and using that program to send participants to work at a series of chicken processing plants owned by Simmons Foods. And in these programs, the participants worked without pay more than 40 hours per week. They were gutting chickens, slaughtering chickens, packaging chicken parts, processing chicken meat for Walmart, KFC, Popeyes. Rachel Ray’s Nutrish pet food brand, which is an organic pet food brand that’s sold all over the country. PetSmart dog and cat food. And these participants were working without pay, for very long periods of time, in an industry that is rife with injuries, notorious for injuries. And many of them were getting very badly injured on the job.
RS: Oh, and you have some graphic accounts, ah–first of all, I mean, we should understand this is grueling work. And no wonder they were having trouble getting people to do it normally, particularly the late shifts and everything, you know.
SW: Yes.
RS: And it smells, and it’s dangerous, and tedious in every respect. And you describe scenes where someone was trying, had their glove caught in the conveyor belt, and someone tried to help them, and their hand gets mangled. And then it turns out the company doesn’t–because these are contract workers, the company doesn’t even have to provide medical or workers’ comp or any of the normal things. That’s the outfit that the judge has sent this person to.
SW: Right. That’s what makes it such a great deal for private companies. Because unlike regular employees, they don’t have to give these individuals days off or time off. They don’t have to give them holidays or sick days. They don’t have to pay overtime a lot of the time, or pay for workers’ comp insurance. These rehab programs are telling the companies, hey, we’ll take care of all of these things. We’ll make sure that you always have an employee, they’re never not going to show up, or not be on time. We’ll make sure they’re drug tested and sober. And so really, because so many of them are there under court order–they’re possibly facing years and years in prison if they don’t complete the program–they have to be there. And if they’re badly injured on the job, they end up having to stay, or face significant prison time for getting injured at work and not being able to complete the program.
RS: Yeah. So you have this disciplined workforce that can’t object to, in many cases–not all, but in most cases–what is it, not being paid.
SW: Right. In all the programs that we’ve written about so far, none of the participants are getting paid for their labor.
RS: OK, and to be clear about this, the company that has put up these workers, they provide barracks, they provide some very minimal training, they feed them. And yet if these workers complain about any aspect of it–the fact that all the money goes to the so-called rehab program–they’re going to be sent back to prison. That’s a heck of an incentive to keep your mouth shut.
SW: Exactly.
RS: And the judges–actually, what’s interesting that emerged in your articles is that the regulatory agencies and laws don’t really matter. The judges don’t really care. They don’t look into this. They think they’re doing, what, God’s work, or–you know, because sometimes there’s a big Christian aura over the whole thing, and required church attendance, required Bible study. And now go out and pluck chickens on an assembly line. And what was–I don’t want to jump to the end too quickly. But after reading all of your studies and listening to the Reveal programs–and one thing here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and I know this because my–full disclosure, my wife Narda Zacchino, who used to be a big editor at the L.A. Times, does some work here–
SW: Yes.
RS: –you folks pride yourself on getting results, getting change, getting laws changed. Which is valid, and that’s why you win a lot of prizes. But in the case of this series that you did, despite being a Pulitzer finalist, despite–and you won the Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists; you won a Knight Award, you know. And this is, by the way, for a 34-year-old; you’re in a long line of winning ever since, I guess, you got out of high school. The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t seem the laws got changed.
SW: Yeah, yeah.
RS: Or enforced, is more to the point.
SW: Right, right, right.
RS: So tell me about that. Because as recently as May of this year–this year–the health department in Louisiana spent all of two days with, I gather, two nurses who looked into this. And for two days they made some very minor adjustments, and basically said no, this is fine. This whole program where a judge sentences somebody, if you don’t want to go to prison you go here to this–and you end up working in the oil fields, or a chicken–I mean, these are rough jobs that you’re sent to.
SW: Yes, yes, yes. Yes.
RS: And so that must have been disappointing, that you–that they, what, whitewashed the whole thing?
SW: Well, rehab programs are regulated so differently from state to state. And each state has their own standards and requirements. And a common theme among all of these programs is that they tend to be unregulated. They’re not licensed, they don’t have medical staff or other aspects to their program that would typically have to fall under regulation in these states. On top of that, many of them are Christian-based or faith-based, and many Christian-based programs in the United States are eligible for licensing exemptions from state to state. They’re not required to be licensed, because they–
RS: Because they’re filing gospel?
SW: [Laughs]
RS: No, I mean, really. Is that thought to be a substitute for knowing how much you have to feed people, or medical care, or–?
SW: A lot of programs fall under those licensing exemptions. That was the case for Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery. There’s another program that we wrote about–
RS: That’s where the chicken-pluckers came from, yeah.
SW: Exactly, exactly. In North Carolina, there was a rehab founder named Jennifer Warren who founded a program called Recovery Connections Community. Prior to founding that program, she ran a different program that was licensed by the state. And she actually had her license to provide counseling revoked after she got into a sexual relationship with a client, was found to be misusing donations for personal gain, taking people’s food stamps and misusing the food stamps. So after getting kicked out of this other program, she founded a new one. When they started getting complaints about her program not following licensing requirements, a licensing investigator came out to visit, to do a site visit, and this investigator actually told Ms. Warren which–how to describe her program so that it fell outside of licensing requirements. And so as long as she described her program in a certain way, using certain language, she would not have to be licensed by the state, and therefore fall under no scrutiny for the things that she was doing with her program. And what we uncovered with that program is that she was sending people to work sometimes up to 80 hours per week at adult care homes, where they were taking care of elderly and disabled patients; they were changing diapers, bathing people, showering them, dispensing medications. A lot of participants in this rehab program ended up relapsing that way, because they had easy access to opioids that they were trying to recover from. And there were a lot of participants who also abused, sexually assaulted or abused, patients in these adult care homes. And again, they were not getting paid for any of this work. All of the pay was going to the Warrens, and they were using it for their own purposes.
RS: So let’s cut to the heart of this. Because really at the center is this word, regulation. And for a long time now, in the name of the free market, against government bureaucracy, any kind of regulation is being given a bad rap. It gets in the way of efficiency, and so whether it was–you know, Ralph Nader was the first one to challenge it, about the automobile industry: no, you can have regulations requiring seat belts, and safety codes and so forth; it actually does save lives. But generally there’s been a feeling, now, don’t get in the way of business, and don’t get in the way of good intentions. Now, there’s another assumption here. We generally have a consensus developing that our prison system, our incarceration system, is fundamentally flawed. It’s enormously expensive, it doesn’t rehabilitate people, and you got to do something. This became the quick fix. Let’s take prisoners, and what they need is a solid, you know, commitment to work and a good attitude. You know, kind of tough love. And if you’re on the assembly line plucking chickens, or out in some risky oil-rig job, you’re going to be rehabilitated. Right? And let’s not talk too much about requirements of education, or training, or skill set. And this became kind of the cop-out, right? So people sending what is basically an indentured, or slave, workforce into industry. And mind you, these are the industries that supply the chickens that you eat, and your fast food. They supply the petroleum that you’re pumping into your car. Right?
SW: Right.
RS: These are modern, high-tech, well-advertised industries with big PR staffs. And they actually give themselves awards, and other people, for their prison rehabilitation work.
SW: Yeah.
RS: And it’s basically–would you give me a summary of it? Is it basically a coercive cop-out?
SW: Well, one distinction I would make with these programs and prison labor is that a lot of people who end up getting sent to these programs by the court system have not been convicted of any crimes yet. Which is why a lot of legal experts are arguing that they are a violation of the 13th Amendment.
RS: Tell us about the 13th Amendment, because that is pretty basic to the U.S. Constitution–
SW: It’s true.
RS: –and we forget the Founders faced a situation in society where we had a lot of people who were held in the stockade or something, because oh, you violated the terms of your employment, or what have you. You know, comparable to the way we treat undocumented people now, and you know, even without a trial you’re guilty. So tell us about the 13th Amendment and how it applies to your series, because it keeps coming up.
SW: It does.
RS: Most of the lawyers that you talk to say, wait a minute, this is clearly a violation.
SW: Right, right. The 13th Amendment basically outlawed slavery in the United States. And it states that involuntary servitude is not OK, except essentially as a punishment upon conviction of a crime. And so when you have participants who are getting sent by courts to these programs, ostensibly for rehab and treatment for their addictions, what lawyers have told us is there’s an argument that that violates the 13th Amendment. Because not only sometimes are there no convictions in these cases yet, but a lot of the time, even if there are convictions, the courts are saying: this is not for punishment. This is to rehabilitate you. This is to provide treatment so that you can recover from your addictions and become a productive member of society.
RS: And the focus here, by the way, is on drug courts, where–you can make the argument these are actually victimless crimes, very often.
SW: Yes. A lot of people that I’ve talked to have been charged with marijuana possession. Or possession of pain pills, or you know, misdemeanor to felony drug offenses that increasingly are being treated by the courts as something that should not send someone to prison. But in many of these states, people are facing a lot of prison time if they don’t complete the drug court program, or they don’t complete this work-based rehab program.
RS: Yeah. And also in your article series–which, you know, “All Work. No Pay”–what was interesting is we not only have lost the notion of rehabilitation of prisoners, we’ve also lost the notion of mental healthcare. And you have some poignant stories in your series of people who really clearly needed serious mental health treatment.
SW: Yes, yes.
RS: And end up killing themselves, or having disastrous results. And there’s some–baked into this notion of tough love, which took over particularly in the South, that somehow, you know, the right stick, and combined with gospel, somehow will make you that decent person.
SW: Yes.
RS: And in fact, no, very often it makes you kill yourself. Or suffer medical injuries without proper care.
SW: Well, especially with addiction. A huge percentage of people who struggle with addiction have underlying mental health problems. So you know, with the recent story, the most recent program that we wrote about, about a program called the Cenikor Foundation. It’s been around for decades. It’s one of the longest-running and largest of these types of programs in the country. They actually claim to provide counseling in their program, but what we found is that participants were being forced to work so many hours that they really didn’t have time for counseling at all. And the program sold itself in that way, and attracted a lot of people with very serious mental health conditions. But they weren’t able to get the treatment that they needed when they were there. And this was the program that was sending people to work at Exxon, at Shell, also at Walmart. You know, they’re spending the vast majority of their time working at for-profit companies instead of getting the mental health treatment and the treatment for their addictions that they need.
RS: I think people should understand, there’s an assumption that somehow in our country we’re past these old problems of slave labor, forced labor and so forth. And between the situation of so many people who don’t have legal status–these are not people who’ve committed a crime, other than crossing the border somehow–they have no rights that are observed. So if they don’t go along, whatever their employment situation, boom, you’re out, and can be accused of a crime. But here we’re talking about people–we’re trying, there seems to be consensus, republicans, democrats–that we can’t go on incarcerating so many millions of people in this country, right? And unfortunately, some of them don’t want to do it only because it’s expensive, not just as a human rights–I shouldn’t say “just as,” not as a human rights thing. But the fact of the matter is, we’re up against maybe we don’t have non-primitive means that we’re willing to use. They require education, they require consideration, healthcare, right? And that rehabilitation may cost money. It may not be as simple as go stand on an assembly line and, you know, suck some blood out of a chicken as it goes past you. You know, and do this work, hard work, for long hours. Maybe something else is required, you know?
SW: Right.
RS: Treatment. Treatment, you know, and that takes money and effort.
SW: Yes, yes.
RS: So basically, what your series–that was the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize; I want to stress, people who read this and judged it considered it one of the very best national stories in the country–unfortunately, I don’t think that story has changed much.
SW: Yeah. [Laughs]
RS: Well, let’s dwell on that a little bit. Because after all, as you said, you got into this to try to make things better. And I’m talking to you because I want to make things better. And is this some game we’re playing? I mean, so let’s just address that for a few minutes. Why don’t they have to respond? Why does it fall on deaf ears? Not always, but in this case.
SW: Yeah. I mean, I think what you just described is exactly right. There are a lot of people in this country who still don’t have health insurance. They still don’t have healthcare that might pay for mental health treatment, addiction treatment, counseling, methods that could actually address their addiction problems. And I think a lot of courts are ultimately relying on these programs, not even necessarily because they believe that they’ll work, but because they are low-cost or they’re free. You know, they’re not going to require courts or states to pay for them. And they are typically free or low-cost for participants, too. So if you’re someone struggling with addiction who doesn’t have financial resources, who doesn’t have healthcare or insurance, this is likely going to be your only option for rehab, is a program that requires you to do uncompensated work. And until that is addressed, this type of program is likely going to continue to exist, and courts are likely to continue to rely on them.
RS: And it’s going to continue to fail. One thing I haven’t mentioned, reading your stories, the statistics are depressing.
SW: Yeah.
RS: I mean, in one program they had an eight percent success record. What is that?
SW: Well, and eight percent, it just–that’s the rate that the program is stating that people graduate from the program.
RS: Graduate, right. Only eight percent actually get through and avoid returning to prison.
SW: They might not even avoid returning to prison. Because if you complete this program, there’s no guarantee that you’re not going to relapse, especially if you haven’t received what you needed out of the program. So even that is not necessarily an indication that the program works in terms of rehabilitation.
RS: So let’s wrap this up, in maybe too tight a little knot. But if you think of your own child–you’re listening to this, and you think, OK, your child or your nephew, or some friend, or yourself–you’ve probably gone, many people have gone to a school where they got a good education. They had a family structure that if they had psychological problems, they would get treatment. They probably had a healthcare plan or other resources to do it. In this case, looking at the people you describe in this story, most of them didn’t go to wonderful schools, and they didn’t have this family support. And you know, they were out there in an ever-tougher market for people who lack the right skills, and so forth.
SW: Right.
RS: So they are caught, or charged, with committing a crime. Some of these people didn’t even have a trial. And some judge, who thinks he’s doing the right thing, or she thinks she’s doing the right thing, says well, why do I just want to lock this person up? They’ll come out worse; I know the prison system. Why don’t we, with the grace of God and gospel–and there’s a little bit of Christian overlay, which is true of many of these programs–try to get this person a second chance by plucking chickens on an assembly line, right? For grueling, hard work, but it’s better than being in prison. A number of the people you quote in this series say, no, it wasn’t better. You know.
SW: Right. I mean, I think–I will say–
RS: And–so–just to put the finest point on it, this is kind of a hoax of we’re going to do it a better way, when actually you’re doing it in a way that’s doomed to failure. So the next turn of the screw will be, oh no, lock ‘em up. Stiffer sentences. We tried reform and it didn’t work. No, you didn’t try reform. You tried a charade of reform. That’s really what your series exposed.
SW: Yeah.
RS: And then the saddest thing–correct me if I’m wrong–despite your being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winning the Knight Award and the Society of Professional Journalists award, so your series was honored–sadly enough, they didn’t have to do anything about it, the people running these programs. They could blow you off.
SW: Yeah. I mean, you know, there have been some positive changes that have come out of the series. There’s a number of criminal and regulatory investigations that remain ongoing. There are, I believe 10, up close to 10 federal class-action lawsuits currently ongoing. Participants are suing these programs for back wages, and many of the complaints allege human trafficking, 13th Amendment violations, and violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. So those are still ongoing. There were a number of courts that did stop sending people to these programs. And of course, many, many people who have stopped sending their loved ones to these programs. And I will say that there are people who will claim that they were helped by these programs. And I think that is true; I think there is a very small minority of people who do seem to find recovery in these programs. But it’s a very, very small minority. And I think in terms of courts sending people to these programs, because we don’t have a system of addiction care set up that helps objectively evaluate people who need treatment, to determine what might be the best treatment for them, it’s kind of a trial and error approach. And people who are going into programs voluntarily, they have the luxury of trial and error to an extent; if they have family resources and some form of stability, they can try many different approaches until they find something that works. But people in the criminal justice system don’t have that luxury. They’re often given one option or nothing at all, and oftentimes that option does not work for them. And I think that’s just going to continue to be the case, because still for the vast majority of people struggling with addiction, it’s prison, it’s incarceration of some kind. And for those who get another opportunity, it likely is not going to work for them.
RS: Yeah. But when I say doomed to failure–and I recommend people read this series–if you want to give people a shot at normal life when they’re plucking these chickens, pay ‘em. That would be one good thing, you start to get some cash income. Don’t just pay the people who’ve turned you over, you know, and then you got to go back to basically what is a form of prison, wait for the next day’s work. Give them some rewards, show them that work gives some advantage. So I think you’ve really described a system designed to fail. However, I like your optimism at the end. The series is called “All Work. No Pay.” And the reason I’m doing this podcast is not to increase cynicism. I feel optimistic; here we have a 34-year-old reporter who’s winning all these prizes and doing great work. And I think people have got to–this is a second chance. That’s why I do these podcasts. Try to get people, you know, to read it and act on it. You know, find out. And even–you know, it’s not just Louisiana or Florida. After all, these marijuana camps are in California, if you think you live in such an enlightened state, in the big, deep blue. You know, see what they’re doing with their prisons. What happens in New York State? In Illinois? So what I’m trying to do is get people to actually revisit this work. This is terrific journalism. We’ll post it and so forth, so people get the whole collection. “All Work. No Pay.” And I want to thank you for being here.
SW: Thank you so much for having me, Bob.
RS: And continue to follow the work of Shoshana Walter. I want to thank Mario Diaz and Kat Yore, our engineers at KCRW. Joshua Scheer is the producer of Scheer Intelligence. And here at CIR Reveal, we have Mwende Hinojosa. Is that right? You tell me.
SW: Hinojosa.
RS: Hinojosa, who’s been really patient with us. And I think we took a little extra time here, but I think it’s well worth it. These kind of stories should not just be for prizes. What you want to see is the prize in–if this was good enough for the Pulitzer committee, why haven’t you read this story or listened to the Reveal series based on it? How do they get Reveal, how do they get CIR, if they get motivated by this?
SW: Go to RevealNews.org, or you can tune into NPR, your local NPR station or find our podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
RS: Right. And you can do it even on the station that you’re listening to this on, on KCRW, which had that show, so to be applauded. Check it out. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
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