Chris Hedges's Blog, page 193

Supreme Court Allows Use of Pentagon Funds for Border Wall

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court cleared the way Friday for the Trump administration to tap billions of dollars in Pentagon funds to build sections of a border wall with Mexico.

The court’s five conservative justices gave the administration the greenlight to begin work on four contracts it has awarded using Defense Department money. Funding for the projects had been frozen by lower courts. The court’s four liberal justices wouldn’t have allowed construction to start.

The justices’ decision to lift the freeze on the money allows Trump to make progress on a major 2016 campaign promise heading into his race for a second term. Trump tweeted after the announcement: “Wow! Big VICTORY on the Wall. The United States Supreme Court overturns lower court injunction, allows Southern Border Wall to proceed. Big WIN for Border Security and the Rule of Law!”

A trial court initially froze the funds in May and an appeals court kept that freeze in place earlier this month. The freeze had prevented the government from tapping approximately $2.5 billion in Defense Department money to replace existing sections of barrier in Arizona, California and New Mexico with more robust fencing.

The case the Supreme Court ruled on began after the 35-day partial government shutdown that started in December of last year. Trump ended the shutdown in February after Congress gave him approximately $1.4 billion in border wall funding. But the amount was far less than the $5.7 billion he was seeking, and Trump then declared a national emergency to take cash from other government accounts to use to construct sections of wall.

The money Trump identified includes $3.6 billion from military construction funds, $2.5 billion in Defense Department money and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund.

The case before the Supreme Court involved just the $2.5 billion in Defense Department funds, which the administration says will be used to construct more than 100 miles of fencing. One project would replace 46 miles of barrier in New Mexico for $789 million. Another would replace 63 miles in Arizona for $646 million. The other two projects in California and Arizona are smaller.

The other funds were not at issue in the case. The Treasury Department funds have so far survived legal challenges, and Customs and Border Protection has earmarked the money for work in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley but has not yet awarded contracts. Transfer of the $3.6 billion in military construction funds is waiting on approval from the defense secretary.

The lawsuit at the Supreme Court challenging the use of the Defense Department funds was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition.

Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez Show Unity After One-on-One Meeting

WASHINGTON—Two of the most recognizable women in Democratic politics put down their weapons, stood close and tweeted their unity to the world.

The photo of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was intended to “clear the air” between the two and among Democrats broadly after weeks of public griping. But during the 30-minute face-to-face meeting in Pelosi’s soaring Capitol suite, they may well have recognized themselves in each other as key figures in the arc of Democratic politics.

“I don’t think there ever was any hatchet” to bury, Pelosi told reporters just after the summit, described by two Democrats with knowledge of the meeting as being just between the two lawmakers.

Born a half century apart, the 30-year House veteran and the New York newcomer dubbed “AOC” share a commitment on stalwart issues like lower-cost health care and prescription drugs. They are political dynamos who consider it something of an honor to have been vilified by President Donald Trump and his GOP allies as the “crazy,” ”nervous, and un-American faces of the Democratic Party. And they’re giving each other an education — sometimes in public — on how to tread a path that winds from the House to social media ahead of the 2020 elections.

“In our caucus we have our differences,” Pelosi said later. “Respect that instead of making a big issue of it.”

Too late.

The pair had quarreled publicly over the clout of the freshmen who handed House control back to the Democrats — and returned the speakership to Pelosi, who is second in line to the presidency.

The San Francisco Democrat, 79, had noted that the so-called progressive squad of four women of color that includes Ocasio-Cortez is only four people strong among dozens of Democrats. Ocasio-Cortez, 29, openly criticized Pelosi, saying she felt Pelosi had been “outright disrespectful” by “the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color” for criticism. Pelosi had remarked that Ocasio-Cortez and a cohort of other progressives were just four votes in a large Democratic caucus.

Trump’s racist tweets earlier this month urging the “squad” members to “go back” to where they came from ended up giving all Democratic factions something to unite against. All four squad members are U.S. citizens. Only one, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, was born outside the U.S.

Democrats slammed the administration for days. And talk began to bubble on Capitol Hill about a reconciliatory meeting between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, seen by some as a leader in the next generation of progressives.

On the first day of Congress’ August recess, the pair met in Pelosi’s second-floor suite just off the Rotunda. No refreshments or Pelosi’s cherished chocolates were served in the one-on-one meeting, according to a Democratic aide who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the private meeting. The session gave both women victories to report as well as signals to send to their respective constituencies.

Pelosi tweeted out a photo of the pair grinning and arm-in-arm with an American flag behind them, suggesting unity.

“Today, Congresswoman @RepAOC and I sat down to discuss working together to meet the needs of our districts and our country, fairness in our economy and diversity in our country,” the speaker wrote, tagging Ocasio-Cortez and naming some priorities of progressives and moderates alike.

Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent, meanwhile, suggested that his boss had Pelosi’s ear and had delivered a key message with good results.

“It was a very positive and productive meeting about progressive priorities,” he said, refusing to discuss specifics.

Ideologically much aligned on the government’s power and duty to help struggling Americans, the lawmakers draw power from different sources. Pelosi, mother of five and grandmother of nine, gets hers from the Constitution. Ocasio-Cortez draws it from dragon-slaying a Democratic veteran in 2018, winning her seat as the most visible of House freshmen and, now, from a Twitter following of 4.9 million. And they’ve shown signs of raising each other’s political games, from inside the House to the national political stage.

By example, Pelosi has urged Democrats to think pragmatically and treat their diverse opinions on such issues as climate change as assets.

Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, has taught classes to fellow House Democrats on how to use Twitter and Instagram to communicate to constituents in a politically effective way. And her following carries a promise — and a threat — to beam any news around the globe in an instant. Pelosi has said she marvels at the speed and reach of social media, which means she must reckon with liberal House Democrats in real time.

Both women have wielded power from their respective perches to vex Trump. Pelosi used her experience to force him to reopen the government last winter without money for the border wall he demanded — complete with a viral moment in which she clapped and smirked from behind him at the State of the Union address.

Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, has repeatedly burned Trump on his favorite medium, notably after his missive on the racist tweets, “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!”

“You have a racist mind in your head, and a racist heart in your chest,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted back.

On Friday, both emerged from their meeting declaring unity.

Already, there were signs that Republicans were casting Ocasio-Cortez in a role played previously by Pelosi — as a fundraising foil and wrong-headed figure for voters to fear after she muscled through the Affordable Care Act.

The Trump campaign tweeted out a video that opens with a composite of the four members of the squad, with Ocasio-Cortez’s eyes covered by an animation of spectacles with swirly lenses.

“Meet the leaders of the Democratic Party,” it says.

___

Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor contributed to this story.

Social Justice Posters Highlight Health Care in a Magnificent Collaboration

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics and the Esperanza Community Housing Corporation has combined forces to bring 75 powerful and engaging poster works on broad issues of health care to audiences traditionally excluded from the art world in Los Angeles and elsewhere. In more than four decades of chronicling visual artworks that address compelling issues of social justice, I have never seen such a perfect collaboration of two venerable institutions devoted to the finest ideals of humankind. Both organizations have been in the forefront of social change for three decades. Their missions are different, but they overlap in ways that encourage vigorous artistic expression with socially conscious content.

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics, the originator of the stunning bilingual show—on display at Mercado La Paloma in South Central Los Angeles through Sunday—has been collecting, preserving and exhibiting political posters on numerous themes throughout the country and internationally for many years. Its focus has been on posters from historical and contemporary movements for social change. Its exhibitions promote the power of art to educate and inspire people to social action.

Esperanza Community Housing Corporation is a remarkable institution that serves indigenous, black and Latino immigrant communities that historically have been deeply oppressed by health disparities, gentrification, displacement and disinvestment. The organization develops affordable housing, promotes health equity and access to care, mobilizes for environmental justice, and encourages and facilitates economic opportunities in South Central Los Angeles. Above all, it seeks to build hope with populations that have too often lacked it in a racist society.

The organization is located in a large building that was previously a sweatshop, where exploited women bent over sewing machines to produce garments and other products for predatory manufacturers. Esperanza Community Housing is now located in Mercado La Paloma, a market that provides business opportunities for neighborhood residents to reconstruct the bustling markets left behind in their home countries.

Notably, the market has eateries that counter unhealthy and predatory fast-food establishments like McDonalds, Carl’s Jr., KFC and scores of others that pervade urban life, but especially in inner cities with large communities of color. Mercado La Paloma features Mexican, Thai, Ethiopian and other restaurants that serve people’s needs rather than corporate greed. Five hundred customers a day come to the market, seven days a week. All have the opportunity to see the art displayed in the ordinary course of their daily lives.

Arts and culture are a core component of Esperanza’s institutional social justice mandate. The organization empowers local artists, sponsors festivals and offers art exhibitions throughout the year, including the current one, titled “Health Care Not Wealth Care: Posters on Health Activism and Social Justice.” It encompasses yet far transcends the rallying cry of health care for all, as important as that goal is in a nation where millions of residents lack even the rudiments of medical, dental and psychological coverage. To date, it has supported more than 300 local artists with exhibit and performance space. Much of this creative activity celebrates the diverse cultures of South Los Angeles. Above all, the arts focus reflects the deeper commitment to the older, magnificent bread and roses vision that emerged from the historic 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Mass., when courageous women and men fought for something more than mere subsistence living: “Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.”

Full view of the “Stop Fake Clinics” digital print produced in 2018 by Black Women for Wellness in Los Angeles. (Image courtesy of Carol Wells/CSPG)

The partnership of both organizations enables market visitors to enjoy and contemplate the political messages of the posters as they sit at tables eating their meals. The exhibition begins with a quotation from Martin Luther King, in English and Spanish, that sets the tone for all that follow: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

The exhibition includes posters from such renowned artists as Robbie Conal, Doug Minkler, Mariona Barkus, Seth Tobacman, the Guerrilla Girls and Klaus Staeck. Its thematic range and comprehensive coverage make it unique among exhibitions focusing on medical and health care issues.

One of the most powerful posters on display is a 2016 work titled “Exide,” which has unnerving relevance to the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. In 2000, Exide Technologies operated a battery plant around the clock, seven days a week, in nearby Vernon. In 2013, residents of the predominantly Latino communities near the facility learned that the company had been spewing lead and arsenic emissions into their neighborhoods for many years. These substances caused learning disabilities and cancer among the low-income residents. The poster was part of the community’s efforts to raise awareness about environmental racism in the Los Angeles area and elsewhere.

The University of Southern California’s Community Outreach and Engagement Program created the poster, encouraging people to organize against the environmental catastrophe. In 2015, Exide signed an agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office to close its plant permanently in order to avoid prosecution for its environmental criminal conduct. This is one of hundreds of examples of how art can foster political awareness.

The exhibition also highlights an equally powerful 2016 poster about another environmental and political calamity. Rudolph Pokornoy’s “Citizens of Flint: Eat Lead” exposed one of the most grotesque policies in recent decades. Seeking to “save money,” the local government switched the city water source in Flint, Mich., to the Flint River. Flint’s mostly black residents almost immediately began to see, taste and smell the difference in their water, but for two years, their complaints were ignored. They were forced to drink and bathe in contaminated water.

State officials knew that the water supply had been contaminated and deliberately concealed this knowledge. Many lawsuits have been filed, but the health damages have been done. The dramatic “Citizens of Flint: Eat Lead,” with its image of a pistol pointed at the residents of Flint, and many other artworks, have informed people throughout the nation of the deeply racist nature of this tragedy.

Some of the posters focus on a theme often neglected in contemporary debates about health care: gun violence. Especially in South Central Los Angeles and similar low-income communities, where shootings are an unfortunate daily occurrence, this problem needs to be recognized as a public health crisis. As Mariona Barkus reveals in her 2018 poster, the American Academy of Pediatricians called gun violence the third leading cause of death for children. Her poster and others in the show remind viewers that this problem needs to be solved.

Domestic violence is another profound feature of health care that needs to be addressed. Three heartbreaking posters, one in Spanish, drive the point home. The artworks reveal the devastating effects of domestic violence on women, and especially on mothers and their children. This scourge, to be sure, affects the populations that regularly visit Mercado La Paloma, but it also cuts across racial and class lines throughout the nation. These posters are vivid visual reminders of a crisis enveloped in the fog of taboo and denial.

The exhibition also features posters from several countries and time periods that reveal the global struggle for decent treatment and appropriate accommodations for people with disabilities. One dramatic example is from German artist Klaus Staeck, who depicted the Mona Lisa in a wheelchair. This image is jarring for audiences who know Leonardo da Vinci’s portrayal of her enigmatic smile and then realize that even she can be subject to a life-altering impairment. Other posters in this category are similarly unnerving and encourage viewers to reflect on the continuing inadequacy of resources for disabled people.

AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases remain enormous health care issues in the U.S. and the world, despite significant medical advances in recent years. The exhibition features the iconic “Silence = Death” poster produced by Gran Fury Collective of Act Up. The work appropriated the pink triangle the Nazis used to persecute homosexuals during the Holocaust. Used as a consciousness-raising artistic symbol in the 1980s, it retains its force in the continuing battle against AIDS in Africa, Asia and elsewhere—as well as in parts of the U.S., especially among incarcerated people. Other posters warn of the dangers of inadequate treatment for people with STDs.

The battle for reproductive rights has become a huge public policy issue in the wake of recent attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and, in Missouri, Louisiana, Alabama and other states, to eliminate abortion altogether. Several posters, including some recent efforts, warn viewers of the dangerous attacks on the right to choose.

An especially significant work picturing a young black woman in this category came from Black Women for Wellness. This poster warns women to be alert for fake clinics, especially in African American communities. Anti-choice extremists have established almost 4,000 bogus “health” clinics throughout the country, which do not provide reproductive health services; instead, women are lied to and pressured about their decision to obtain abortions. Some are even told that abortions cause cancer. Some of these institutions that prey upon vulnerable populations have even received public funding.

Few Americans are aware of another health crisis: female genital mutilation (FGM), which has profoundly disturbing implications for more than 300 million girls and women, especially in Africa, the Mideast and Asia. An older poster addresses the practice of removing parts of female genitals, depicting it as a feature of male control over female sexuality. FGM can have severe health consequences, including difficulties passing urine and menstrual flow, chronic pain and even fatal bleeding. The text of the poster contains outdated information, reminding audiences that FGM is far from dead; although illegal in the U.S., 2017 CNN reported that it is on the rise, especially among immigrant groups in California, New York and Minnesota.

Most people who regularly patronize Mercado La Paloma are familiar with workplace hazards. Several posters in the exhibition address the pervasive problems of occupational health and safety. Asbestosis, lead poisoning, burns, amputations, emphysema, dermatitis, skin cancer and deafness have plagued the workplace for decades, despite laws and regulations ostensibly designed to curb abuses.

People in clerical positions, mostly women, are subject to an often-ignored workplace hazard. Doug Minkler’s poster, “More Than a Paycheck,” show how people behind computers bring home eyestrain, backaches, headaches and stress after long hours of repetitive work. Too often, office supervisors view these pink-collar workers as little more than extensions of their computers. This is an international health crisis of the highest magnitude.

Uniting all the diverse themes of these vibrant poster artworks is the demand for health care for everyone. The exhibition recognizes, explicitly and implicitly, the issue of health as a human right and its American corollary—“Medicare for All.” Patrons of Mercado La Paloma and casual viewers of “Health Care Not Wealth Care: Posters on Health Activism and Social Justice” are encouraged to reflect on the present inadequacies of our medical system and to mobilize politically to change it.

In addition to inadequate health care, progressives must recognize and address the fundamental underlying problems of American corporate capitalism: the prison-industrial complex, police misconduct, unnecessary war and out-of-control militarism, seemingly intractable racism, sexism and homophobia, profound disparities of wealth and power and inadequate educational opportunities.

Art, throughout history, has played a major role in generating consciousness of grave social, political and economic ills. Both the Esperanza Community Housing Corporation and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, through its past, present and future exhibitions, play an indispensable part in this process.

Paul Krassner Gave a Shit About Everything

“Irreverence is our only sacred cow.” —Paul Krassner

Paul Krassner died Sunday at 87, and more than anybody else in his generation, he lived his life demonstrating over and over and over again how the best way to save our country from the relentless onslaught of polarizing politics that buries our enthusiasm for a kinder and gentler society is with friendship and humor, pure and simple. “Trying to save the world is a banker’s mentality,” he once told me while we were eating grapes at his kitchen table, “which is why I like to spend my time paying attention.” He did that kind of thing all the time, to everybody he knew—that thing being to camouflage his wisdom in an ad-lib phrase, improvised pun or invented idiom, which he’d then deliver as if it were nothing, a harmless ball of bubblegum, maybe. Only after you’d spend the next hour chewing on what he’d said would you realize that what he’d given you wasn’t glib or trivial or disposable at all. Instead, he’d given you something you found yourself replaying in your head and wanting to share with others, the wanting to share part being precisely what brings meaningful cohesion to the multitude.

Of course, he always did claim that English was his second language, laughter being his first.

***

On a chilly Friday night in 2007, when most of L.A. was still shoving Kleenex balls into its pants and mouthing the words “Please love me” into its bathroom mirror, a 75-year-old man wearing a dirty, red satin baseball jacket, a black T-shirt emblazoned with a pot leaf the size of a spinning boomerang and hair like steel wool said from the tiny stage of the M Bar, “I’d like to end on a note of hope, since I talked about a lot of negative stuff tonight.” He went on to discuss the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and how it had recently been moved from seven minutes before midnight to five minutes before midnight, midnight being the end of the world. “The good news,” he said, “is that scientists are people, just like the rest of us, and they’re probably just as neurotic as we are, so they probably set the clock to be 10 minutes fast—so it’s really only a quarter of.”

The room went crazy with applause, and then everybody went outside to have their cars retrieved by the strip mall’s valet service, while I stayed inside to watch person after person thank Paul Krassner for his performance—and for the work he’d done his whole life.

***

Krassner, a founding member of the Youth International Party (known as the Yippies), a Merry Prankster, a contributor to Mad Magazine, the ninth member of the Chicago Seven and the father of the underground press, began publishing The Realist—which is now being called the “Charlie Hebdo of American satire,” and which writer Terry Southern referred to as “the first American publication to really tell the truth”—in 1958 and stopped in 2001, finally upstaged by real-world events whose tragedy and absurdity trumped any and all satirical contrivances. After all, it was during that year, on Sept. 11, that the United States was attacked by 19 men with box cutters who ended up killing nearly 3,000 people. The date of the attack also happened to be the 126th anniversary of the initial publication of the very first newspaper comic strip in the U.S., “Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm.” It was published by the New York Daily Graphic newspaper, whose offices had been located some 5,000 feet away from the site of the World Trade Center.

Appropriately, the 1875 strip depicted a self-aggrandized egomaniac who attempts to protect himself from the threat of a home invasion by stockpiling excessive firearms and weaponry and installing a foolproof security system designed to prevent a surprise attack. In the comic strip, the firepower and security system don’t work, and Professor Tigwissel is attacked, but he arrogantly claims success afterward. He promises to patent his device to perpetuate the notion that we are best protected by the machinery of our paranoia and a weaponized mistrust of the world, rather than by a less hysterical adherence to truth, justice, humanitarianism and mutual cooperation. Such was the premonitory power of the cartoonist in the late 19th century, and such was the sickening plunge of real life into the realm of gruesome fantasy many years later, that rendered the satire of The Realist no longer allegorical, but literal—literalism being to allegory what a real fire is to a crowded theater.

Specifically, where there once existed a well-informed, anti-authoritarian audience for satire, 21st-century Americans became passive consumers of inconsequential burlesque masquerading as satire. People assumed corporate-sponsored jokes that merely used political personalities and circumstances as fodder the same way that slapstick used seltzer bottles and baggy pants were somehow the same thing as sharp and unforgiving criticism by uncompromising freelancers for the deeper purpose of revealing political and social injustices and commenting on them in a way that engenders more psychic pain than physiological pleasure. The idea became that humorists in search of laughter alone over frank and honest outrage are not satirists for one simple reason: Mirth cripples rage, and rage is necessary for the beating back of political, cultural and religious bullshit in service of change.

As the No. 1 progenitor of all the alternative and underground publications that followed it, The Realist taught us that the best way to rescue a panicked society from drowning is not to throw it a life preserver, but to teach it how to swim.

***

I first met Krassner in 2007 at the M Bar in the crappy New Jersey section of Hollywood at the corner of Vine and Fountain. The bar was a very dark hole crammed into an enormous, two-story, L-shaped concrete monstrosity that has a Jewish deli, a Thai take-out place, an Italian take-out place, a Mexican take-out place, a Ramen/Japanese take-out place, a panini/tapas take-out place, a Cuban take-out place, a “European food” take-out place and a place with the words “A-1 Therapy” written on the door in a font only slightly more professional looking than masking tape. The foil covering the windows at A-1 Therapy suggests that it is a place that grows lizards or baked potatoes.

I had known his work from my college days in the 1980s, when I used to cut class and travel back home to pour over old copies of The Realist at an anarchist bookstore called Wooden Shoe Books in Philadelphia. In many ways, Krassner gave me my career as a cartoonist by both proxy and demonstration. When it came to the politics of being a smartass, he was the one consistent practitioner of prankster journalism, social commentary and political satire that, because of his relentless presence on the scene, gave some measure of credibility to the First Amendment and, yes, democracy, itself.

When Jack Weinberg said, in 1965, not to trust anybody over 30, Krassner was 33, an old, old man, and certainly an exception to the adage. With the gargantuan reputation of his magazine, The Realist—the flagship publication of the radical left at the time, perhaps of all time, and indispensable rag to the hemorrhaging heart of the Vietnam War-addled counterculture—he had established himself as the Walter Cronkite of the underground press and was considered the most trusted investigative satirist working in Amockrica.

“The irony is that I’ve always tried to uphold the virtues of the Constitution and I never took an oath to do it, while [the politicians I target] did take an oath, and they’re the ones trying to destroy the Constitution,” he told me at lunch in Santa Monica six hours before he stepped onto the M Bar stage. Amazed at the clarity of his mind and the animated enthusiasm with which the septuagenarian still seemed to give a shit about everything, I asked him how he’d been able to survive while so many of his contemporaries, like Timothy Leary, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg and, most notably, his fellow co-founders of the Youth International Party and co-conspirators in the Chicago Seven Conspiracy trial—Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who John Lennon called the Mork and Mindy of the ’60s—had died. “Simple,” he said. “I’ve never taken any legal drugs.”

Having left Los Angeles in 2000 to live in Desert Hot Springs, a hundred miles away, he was only in town to do the one-nighter at the M Bar. “I’ve never played a strip mall before,” he said. “I played the Brentwood bakery once, and anybody who came got a free pastry.” I asked him if he missed Los Angeles. His wife, Nancy, who was sitting with us, said yes enthusiastically. He gave me this answer later, standing in the spotlight a mere 40 feet from A-1 Therapy.

“Desert Hot Springs is not like L.A.,” he said. He explained how every clerk at every retail shop he patronized in his new hometown never failed to remind him at the conclusion of every business transaction to “have a nice day!” Have a nice day! Have a nice day! Have a nice day!—it followed him everywhere. Have a nice day! “Just on the way over here tonight,” he said, capping a water bottle he’d just taken a swig from, “I bought this bottle of water from a girl who was sitting behind a cash register, looking really sullen. I figured that here was my chance to, you know, make her feel good with everything that I learned in [Desert Hot Springs]. So, after I paid for the water, I looked at her and I said (gleefully), ‘Aren’t you going to tell me to have a nice day?’ ‘It’s on the fucking receipt!’ she said.” It gave him the biggest smile I’d seen on his face all day.

I left the club at 9:15 p.m., while there was still a line of people hoping to shake hands with Krassner. Stepping into the parking lot, I noticed that there was still a tiny bit of pink light clinging to the horizon and, with Krassner’s Groucho Marxism still ping-ponging around inside my mood, I decided to imagine that I was looking at the dawn and hoped that with any luck I would always be that mistaken about the dark.

What follows is a portion of one of the last conversations I had with him.

Mr. Fish: Besides attracting many of the most celebrated writers as contributors during its more than two decades in print—writers such as Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Avery Corman—The Realist also attracted a number of famous cartoonists to its pages. In addition to running Ron Cobb, Wally Wood, S. Clay Wilson, Charles Rodrigues, Art Spiegelman and Dick Guindon, who were among the top counterculture cartoonists of the 1960s, you also published a handful of more mainstream cartoonists whose work typically appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and the Harvard Business Review. These were cartoonists who wished to publish edgier work on racism, birth control, the Vietnam War, censorship and women’s rights, which were topics that conventional magazines would never run. These cartoonists included Jules Feiffer, Mort Gerberg, Sam Gross, Frank Interlandi, Lee Lorenz and B. Kliban.

Paul Krassner: Right—remember, this was a time when there were cartoonists who were basically gag writers and cartoonists who were more interested in satire. Gag cartoonists like [those] who drew for The New Yorker made a lot more money than cartoonists like Cobb or Guindon. But [publishing] The Realist was never about making money, and neither was creating [satirical cartoons] that attacked the establishment.

MF: That’s why Cobb eventually had to quit doing it and go into designing spaceships and aliens for fucking Hollywood. It’s kind of heartbreaking.

PK: That’s what Lenny Bruce’s Lone Ranger was about—saving people and not expecting any reward for doing it.

MF: Can a gag cartoon sometimes serve the same purpose as a satirical cartoon?

PK: No.

MF: Why not?

PK: Because with satire, there will always be people who believe that it’s real, that the government is capable of the most outrageous things, which, of course, it is. So, in a way, [satire] actually informs people of a danger that’s real by attracting their attention to the truth with a lie. The New Yorker doesn’t do that.

MF: Because you have interviewed and/or published so many of the most important and influential thinkers and artists of the mid-20th century, I thought it might be smart to get your perspective on why, when it comes to contemporary culture, artists and writers and poets and painters and social philosophers, either by accident or by deliberate design, have been removed from the national debate about who we are as a species and where we are going as a society.

PK: [Partly the trouble] is that so much of what passes for satire nowadays isn’t real satire, at least not in the traditional sense. For one thing, it isn’t even ironic—it’s Sarcasm 101. Audiences will applaud for name-calling as a replacement for wit.

MF: I agree—real satire begs a conversation to happen after the joke has been told. Not only that, [it] assumes that a conversation had been going on previous to the telling of the joke. [Satire] assumes that the audience is there to do at least half of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting the punch line and recognizing the irony or the hypocrisy of whatever is being lampooned.

PK: And that’s the subjective side of humor—all that [foreknowledge] that makes satire work. There are a lot of factors to consider when building strong satire. But there’s also the objective side [of humor] that, if you can get it in with the subjective side, it really makes for [a good joke].

MF: The difference between a clown eating a shit sandwich for no reason and the pope eating a shit sandwich for some reason.

PK: Yeah. In 1978, I went with my daughter, Holly, to Ecuador on a shamans and healers expedition, and we stayed with primitive Indians and took ayahuasca—I should say, indigenous Indians, because they looked at us as if we were the primitive ones. Anyway, we lived for a while with three generations of Chiapas Indians. There were about 15 people in our group, and one of them was an anthropologist, but after a while it became clear that we were the subjects and [the Chiapas] were the anthropologists. I remember watching a mother who was talking to us and how she was playing with her naked son’s penis and how there was no internalization of inhibited social structures, at least none that I could relate to. [Similarly], they would watch us brushing our teeth or doing Tai Chi and wonder what the hell we were doing, you know. It was peculiar to them, like we were Martians who had dropped out of the sky. Regardless, I had these bright green sunglasses, and I let everybody try them on, and they all laughed at each other because [the visual] had elements of incongruity. They didn’t know our language, but they knew what they felt in their gut, which was that it was silly. So, while so much of American humor has a lot to do with taste, and so much satire has an agenda that serves either the right or the left, there’s a primal sense of humor that resonates with people because it transcends culture and is universal [to everybody].

MF: Right, that’s the appeal of slapstick, I guess. Maybe it’s even the appeal of much of commedia dell’arte, stereotypes being much more closely related to our lower base functions [than our higher]. Still, what scares me is how society can sometimes misconstrue the ease of experiencing that primal sense of humor you mentioned as being the only genuine humor there is and, therefore, the only humor we should recognize. Way too often I hear pundits complaining that satire, like “The Daily Show” or The Onion or “South Park,” is not real humor because it parodies political grandstanding and hate speech and religious buffoonery, that sort of thing. In other words, I’m uncomfortable when the definition of humor excludes irony and critical thinking and dissent because it is assumed that people are way too stupid to get the joke. I hate the notion that laughter cannot be used as a teaching tool and that censorship is somehow preferable as a mode of communication.

PK: Exactly. With The Realist, I would never label an article as either journalism or satire because I didn’t want to deprive the readers of the pleasure of discerning for themselves what was true and what was an extension of the truth.

MF: I remember you saying that for years you received letters from people who thought that your famous piece about the Kennedy assassination was real investigative journalism.

PK: I still get them!

MF: And that speaks to how absolutely bizarre reality can be in comparison to satire. The fact that you were able to write something that was so fantastic and so ludicrous and still have people confused about whether it was fiction or nonfiction, even 50 years later, is really telling about how the world works. It reminds me of an argument that I have with 9/11 conspiracy theorists all the time. I’m forever telling them to expand their rage and distrust of the government beyond what happened on September the 11th, because if you’re looking for examples of how distrustful Washington is and how the president is a complete asshole [who is] able to commit unforgivable crimes against humanity and [who can] kill thousands of innocent people for purely political reasons, just look at his domestic policies against poor and underprivileged people living in the country right now. Look at his foreign policy, which is not secret and is published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal every day. For fucksake, beginning with the sanctions against Iraq, implemented by the first Bush in ’91, straight through until now, we’re responsible for millions of deaths that could have been avoided. Then there’s Clinton’s bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant [in 1998] that destroyed the lives of millions of people. The point is, by sitting across the street from the White House in a windowless van with your night binoculars trained on shadows you see through the curtains, you risk missing what is already happening in broad daylight, which is stuff that is way worse than what you’re trying to uncover.

PK: Right, like looking for dirt on Eva Braun.

MF: (laughs) Exactly!

PK: But, yeah, getting back to your point about satire, it is much harder to create satire when the world itself is naturally satirical.

MF: So then we have to ask the question of what jokes do. Do jokes spotlight what is already funny about the world or do jokes reinterpret the world and create something funny about it? Is it funny, for example, that lawyers are cheats and politicians are liars, or is it unfunny that lawyers are cheats and politicians are liars, and jokes help us deal with the misery of that reality? Does satire defang the monsters that we feel most threatened by or does satire give us sanctuary from those monsters, the same way that being locked up in a prison cell protects us from the terror of having to keep up with a mortgage and maintain a lawn? Which came first, the chicken or the rubber chicken?

PK: I don’t know that there’s an answer to that.

MF: Well, I do feel that satire has opened my eyes to certain things, but I’m not sure if it is my inner eye or my outer eye that was opened.

PK: I remember when I was a counselor at a summer camp and how they would show Charlie Chaplin movies and some counselor would inevitably get up and say, “Now the deep social message that Chaplin was trying to convey in the scene when he had to eat his shoelaces …” You know? We were all talking about why we laugh, and the kids were saying, “I thought he had a funny walk.” So, again, there’s that innate sense of humor that we can all tap into and maybe that defangs the monster.

MF: At least the monster that we project onto the world with our own pessimism. That was what John [Lennon] and Yoko [Ono] said when the press accused them of not taking the protests against the Vietnam War seriously enough. They said that they were willing to be the world’s clowns [during their Bed-In event], the idea being that humor is anti-violent. They made the point that you’re unlikely to attack somebody else, much less kill them, when you’re having a laugh.

PK: And yet satire is often called a weapon.

MF: Which brings us back to the precariousness of jokes designed to do something more than just make people laugh. A satirist is either funny when you agree with him or downright mean when you don’t. In fact, there are a lot of people who won’t even call satire art, precisely because it involves [political subject matter]. They’re the same people who insist that the surest way to fuck up a piece of art is to inject politics into it.

PK: There again, it’s all about the individual perception. Some people need politics injected for it to qualify as art.

MF: I agree. There’s also a pretty good argument for how injecting art into politics can fuck up politics—at least how one relates to politics on a personal level. The example that I always give is how watching “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” can fool a person into thinking that he or she is being politically active when he or she isn’t. It’s because watching TV is a private act and engaging in political activity is a public [act], and when somebody is at home watching a television show, though he or she might be agreeing with jokes about, say, the criminality of the president or the injustice or a piece of domestic or foreign policy, he or she is not doing anything about it. In that way, laughter can deter political activity.

PK: I know what you mean, sure. On the other hand, [my wife] Nancy memorized Mort Sahl’s first album [“The Future Lies Ahead,” 1958] when it came out, and when you memorize something like that, you really pick up on a lot of nuance about how the country works. You absorb a lot of critical thinking; it’s a very subtle process. And that can be politicizing and make you politically minded at the very least and make you behave a certain way. I remember when I lived in San Francisco and attended the annual Comedy Day in the Park. This was in the ’80s, in Golden Gate Park, and there was a long string of comedians, and the only thing I remember from the day was a guy standing up and saying, “Isn’t Reagan an asshole?!” And the audience [went] crazy with applause and yells and the guy [said], “Oh, so you like the political stuff.” So there are different standards of what being politically minded means. Sometimes you can be political without naming names. Guys like Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken and Will Rogers were all political.

MF: And so was Bruce, though not overtly so.

PK: Lenny Bruce died to make it safe for Jon Stewart to get laughs by saying words he knows will get bleeped out.

MF: Further proof that Bruce didn’t die for our sins, but because of them. God, I miss that guy

PK: Yeah, me too.

MF: I guess what I worry about is the ability of a good political joke to diffuse the rage that a person might have for a politician who deserves all the vitriol that we can throw at him. Sometimes I think it’s more important to embrace the discomfort that comes from being pissed off about something than to have your disdain obliterated by the relief you get from laughter.

PK: Lenny and I used to talk about this stuff all the time, and his position was that people don’t like to be lectured at. He believed that if you [could] make somebody laugh with a joke that [had] some truth about society embedded within it, the fact that they’re laughing indicates that their defenses are down and that they’re more likely to consider the information you’re telling them. The joke makes it impossible for a person to guard against [the wisdom of the argument] you’re presenting.

MF: Plus, if it’s a good joke, it will bear repeating to more and more people, and the information can become viral that way. It’s like a catchy tune that you want to hear again and again.

PK: Right—I’m relatively jaded, and if something really stirs me, either a contradiction or an absurdity or a horrible cruelty that has been euphemized, and that will set my EEG off, then I’ll want to create a satire that crystalizes that contradiction or whatever it is, and I’ll want to share it with people. Then, if it’s funny, those people will want to share it, too. It’s how The Realist grew. Steve Allen was the first subscriber, and he gave a bunch of subscriptions to a lot of other people, including Lenny Bruce, and then Lenny sent out a bunch, and the magazine really took off that way.

MF: Of course, when it comes to the catchiness of tunes that people want to hear again and again, taste can sometimes trump nutritional value. There’s the two-step, but there is also the goose step.

PK: Right. Now that you mention it, I think “Malthusian” was the word they used to use before “viral.”

MF: Of course—yesterday’s torture is today’s enhanced interrogation.

PK: And dead babies [have always been] collateral damage.

MF: And, thanks to people like you and Lenny Bruce, “Fuck the government” will always mean “Fuck the government.”

Georgia Election Officials Accused of Destroying Evidence

ATLANTA—In a federal court filing, lawyers for election integrity advocates accuse Georgia election officials of intentionally destroying evidence that could show unauthorized access to the state election system and potential manipulation of election results.

Election integrity advocates and individual Georgia voters sued election officials in 2017 alleging that the touchscreen voting machines Georgia has used since 2002 are unsecure and vulnerable to hacking. In a court filing Thursday, they said state officials began destroying evidence within days of the suit’s filing and continued to do so as the case moved forward.

“The evidence strongly suggests that the State’s amateurish protection of critical election infrastructure placed Georgia’s election system at risk, and the State Defendants now appear to be desperate to cover-up the effects of their misfeasance — to the point of destroying evidence,” the filing says.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections, denied the allegations.

The brief was filed Thursday as U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg was holding a hearing on requests by the plaintiffs that she order the state to immediately stop using its current voting machines and switch to hand-marked paper ballots. That hearing is set to continue Friday.

In court Thursday, lawyers for the plaintiffs highlighted weaknesses identified in risk assessment reports by Fortalice Solutions, a cybersecurity firm hired by the secretary of state’s office. Fortalice CEO Theresa Payton testified that her team did find serious risks in their initial 2017 assessment but also said the secretary of state’s office had made progress toward fixing the problems by the time of a subsequent review last November.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers pointed out, however, that the assessment only covered general cybersecurity in the office and that Fortalice wasn’t asked to look at potential risks for election management systems or voting machines.

Judge Totenberg has previously expressed grave concerns about the vulnerability of the state’s election system and scolded state officials for being slow to respond to evidence of those problems, and on Thursday said she still has “worries about the integrity of the voting data system.”

Georgia’s voting system drew national scrutiny last year during the closely watched governor’s race in which Brian Kemp, a Republican who was the state’s top election official at the time, narrowly defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams.

A law passed this year and signed by Kemp provides specifications for a new system, which state officials said will be in place for the 2020 presidential election. But the state still plans to use the current machines for special and municipal elections this year and the plaintiffs fear the outdated machines will also be used in 2020 if a new system isn’t implemented in time.

Lawyers for the state have argued in court filings that new security measures have been put in place to protect the existing system, that the implementation of a new voting system addresses the judge’s concerns and that putting an intermediate hand-marked paper ballot system in place while the state is moving to a new voting system would be “an impossible burden” on state and local election officials.

In their brief Thursday, lawyers for the Coalition for Good Governance accused state officials of destroying computer servers from the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University after a security hole there that exposed Georgia voters’ personal data and passwords used by county election officials was discovered. State lawyers then failed to ask the FBI for a copy of a forensic image the agency made of the server before it was wiped, despite saying they would, they say.

The brief also accuses state officials and their lawyers of deleting and overwriting data preserved on voting machine memories and on memory cards used to program the voting machines.

“After abundant notice of their well-known duty to preserve evidence, the State Defendants did not simply neglect to disable some automated purge function in their IT systems. Rather, they intentionally and calculatingly destroyed evidence,” the brief says. “Surely, to engage in conduct so odious that any junior lawyer would know it would expose them to sanctions, the evidence so disposed of must have been damning in the extreme.”

Secretary of state’s office spokeswoman Tess Hammock said allegations of destroying evidence are false.

“We look forward to vigorously defending ourselves from these spurious allegations meant to distract the Court from the fact that there is no evidence that supports plaintiffs’ outlandish theories,” she wrote in an email.

Many of the allegations stem from the time when Kemp was secretary of state before he became governor. A governor’s office spokeswoman, Candice Broce, declined to comment, referring questions to lawyers for state election officials, who also declined to comment.

Puerto Ricans Demonstrate How to Oust a Corrupt Leader

The movement that forced Ricardo Rosselló to step down as governor of Puerto Rico is one of the largest in the island’s history. It unified people across the ideological and political spectrum toward a common purpose: ending the governor’s corrupt regime. On Monday, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in San Juan to demand “Ricky Renuncia.”

Traveling to her native Puerto Rico to witness what was unfolding, political activist and journalist Rosa Clemente told me in an interview that rumors had spread on Monday that Rosselló was readying his resignation. But then, she said, “He doubled down again by giving a horrific interview on Fox News, and that made especially young people more angry and agitated and ready to stay in the streets.” Rosselló told Fox News’ Shepard Smith that while he wouldn’t seek re-election, he also would not resign on the same day that half a million of the island’s people were demanding he step down.

Two days later, more news outlets began reporting that Rosselló was expected to resign later in the day. Some claimed that he had recorded a farewell message. But as the hours wore on, nothing happened. At that point, the Puerto Rican Legislature threatened to begin impeachment proceedings against him unless he stepped down. Hours later, when the day was nearly over, Rosselló finally conceded. He refused to step down immediately, offering instead to resign Aug. 2.

The thousands of protesters who had remained on the streets of San Juan erupted in cheers and lit fireworks.

How did Puerto Rico’s mass movement mobilize and emerge victorious so rapidly? The protests, which have been going on for two weeks straight, are incredibly diverse, involving Puerto Ricans from all the municipalities, young and old, unionized and unemployed, white and black. Clemente said she considered Monday’s march “historic” in the context of Puerto Rican resistance. “The six-lane highway we were on was packed as far as the eye could see,” effectively shutting it down to traffic. Cruise ships were turned away, the majority of Puerto Rican-run businesses in San Juan were closed, and restaurants handed out free food and water in solidarity.

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Pa'lante Puerto Rico



by

This mass uprising was triggered by the publication of nearly 900 pages of private chat messages between Rosselló and his aides, discussing in disparaging terms the victims of hurricanes Maria and Irma, and making homophobic remarks about LGBTQ Puerto Ricans, including the wildly popular Ricky Martin. Among the chats—dubbed “Rickyleaks”–was a playful threat to shoot Carmen Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan. Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism (its Spanish acronym is CPI) obtained the chat messages and published them online, sparking outrage among the island’s residents, who have struggled for years with a debt crisis, poverty, widespread corruption and nearly 3,000 hurricane-related deaths in 2017 that have yet to be properly acknowledged.

Days before the chat messages were published, the FBI arrested two government officials in Rosselló’s administration on corruption charges involving the illegal awarding of federal contracts to allies and friends. In May, the FBI arrested three Puerto Rican officials on unrelated charges of corruption. A report by the CPI concluded that “the island is the target of a pillage of public funds perpetrated through the sale of influences, contracts and access to benefits in the government.” In other words, the whole system Rosselló presided over is corrupt, and Puerto Ricans now know the extent of it.

The night before Monday’s protest, Clemente conducted an interview with Cruz, who told her, “The world has heard the outcry of the Puerto Rican people, and let me tell you, this is about a lot more than a chat. What the chats did is [unveil] the true face of the governor of Puerto Rico.”

Julio Ricardo Varela, founder of the influential online media outlet LatinoRebels.com, told me in an interview last week that after the controversial chats were made public, Rosselló “got rid of everyone else on the group chat and then said, ‘Well, I’m staying.’ And that’s when the protests started happening.” He warned, “If Ricardo Rosselló continues to stay in office … it’s going to be the worst political damage in the history of Puerto Rico as a colony.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump predictably took political advantage of the unrest by tweeting his disgust with both Rosselló—who recently threatened to punch Trump—and Cruz, who has been his fiercest Puerto Rican critic. He also claimed that “much of their leadership is corrupt, & robbing the U.S. Government blind!” While the first part of that statement is true, the second part is Trump’s attempt to obscure the fact that Puerto Ricans have been the target of almost criminal neglect by the federal government. He claimed that “the United States Congress foolishly gave [Puerto Rico] 92 Billion Dollars for hurricane relief,” a blatant lie that he has repeated many times.

“Washington has literally shut its doors to anyone who wants to lobby for Puerto Rico or talk about the island’s needs,” Varelo noted. “The members of the Puerto Rican political class are accomplices to the colonial system that the American government has created.”

Puerto Ricans feel betrayed by their territorial government and forgotten by the federal government. It’s no wonder they pledged to remain on the streets until Rosselló left office.

What comes next remains to be seen. Secretary of Justice Wanda Vázquez is next in line of succession. But even before Rosselló resigned, Puerto Ricans were demanding an alternative to Vázquez, tweeting #WandaRenuncia and chanting the refrain in the streets. It appears that they will not settle for another figurehead in the top position of a regime that has proven itself to be deeply corrupt.

What’s happened in Puerto Rico provides important lessons for all Americans fed up with our deeply corrupt, racist, misogynist and hateful commander in chief. A sustained mass movement that is committed to changing the system can bring about a revolution, if the circumstances are right. The movement in Puerto Rico succeeded on the same day that contentious, arguably disastrous, hearings on the Robert Mueller investigation were held in Washington, D.C., by lawmakers hoping to drum up public support for impeaching the president. In Puerto Rico, massive grassroots pressure pushed the Legislature to threaten impeachment and force Rosselló’s hand. The same can—and should—happen here, at the federal level.

Tear Gas Company Owner Resigns From Whitney Museum Board

Warren Kanders resigned from the board of trustees of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Times reported Thursday. The move followed months of protests against his company, Safariland, for manufacturing tear gas and other law enforcement and military supplies that have been used against migrants, protesters and other civilians all over the world. Last week, Artforum published an op-ed calling for an artist boycott of the museum. In response, eight artists pulled their work from the museum’s biennial exhibition, a crucial event for the Whitney.

In his resignation letter, Kanders writes, “The targeted campaign of attacks against me and my company that has been waged these past several months has threatened to undermine the important work of the Whitney. … I joined this board to help the museum prosper. I do not wish to play a role, however inadvertent, in its demise.”

The use of tear gas in warfare is banned by the Geneva Conventions, but that didn’t stop law enforcement from using it during Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, the Dakota Access pipeline protests in North Dakota in 2016, or against migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018.

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Protest Erupts Over Guggenheim Museum's Ties to Big Pharma



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Art website Hyperallergic first reported on the connection between Kanders, Safariland and the Whitney in November 2018, building on a tweet by Santa Fe Reporter journalist Aaron Cantú. Tear gas had just been used against migrants seeking asylum in the United States, and reporters found tear gas canisters strewn along the border labeled “Safariland,” or “Defense Technologies,” which is a subsidiary of Safariland. In a now-deleted tweet, Cantú wrote:

Warren Kanders, founder and chairman of Safariland, is also vice chairman of the @whitneymuseum https://t.co/sBaCVTxQ2Uhttps://t.co/VOpDS8cGFj

— A M C (@aaron_con_choco) November 26, 2018

Following this revelation, more than 100 Whitney staff members signed a letter to the museum’s administration demanding that it issue a statement on Kanders’ connection to Safariland, consider asking Kanders to resign, hold a museum-wide meeting to discuss related issues, and create a clearer policy around trustee involvement in the museum.

Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, responded to the staff with his own letter, which decried the growth of nationalism, racism, homophobia and xenophobia across the world, but ultimately declined to take a position against Kanders or further explore the origin of the museum’s philanthropic donations. “The Whitney is first and foremost a museum. It cannot right all the ills of an unjust world, nor is that its role,” Weinberg wrote.

Weinberg’s response set off an initial protest in December, and then a longer series in the spring, every Friday during the nine weeks leading up to the biennial’s opening. The protests were organized by Decolonize This Place, an arts activism group, and a coalition of 30 advocacy groups representing a wide range of causes, including immigration, indigenous rights, Palestinian rights and Black Lives Matter.

Many of the protesters were artists who saw Kanders as just one example of why museums need to reconsider where their money comes from, and how their donors make that money in the first place.

As the Times writes, “Mr. Kanders’s departure could embolden other protest movements that have demanded, with some success, that museums part ways with major donors or trustees.”

Multiple museums, including the Tate in Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, have stopped accepting funding from the Sackler Family, the makers of Oxycontin, a drug linked to the opiate scandal.

Pa’lante Puerto Rico

Just before midnight on Wednesday, Puerto Rico’s governor Ricardo Rossello announced in a prerecorded video message that he would resign, effective Friday, Aug. 2. This capped close to two weeks of nonstop protests.

In Old San Juan, cries of “!Ricky Renuncia!” had been ringing out alongside the traditional refrain, “!Pa’lante!” The first was a demand for the embattled Rossello to resign, while the latter means “onward, forward.” The Caribbean island (along with its smaller islands, Vieques and Culebra) is at a historic crossroads. Hundreds of thousands of people have been marching and protesting daily, following the July 13 release by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism/Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) of close to 900 pages of shocking text messages between Rossello, staffers and advisers. The group chat messages, from late 2018 through January 2019, are riddled with misogyny, homophobia, profanity and violence. The leaks and accompanying articles by CPI sent shockwaves through the Puerto Rican government and drove Puerto Ricans from all walks of life into the streets, demanding change.

The texts, mostly in Spanish, included jokes about the death toll of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Rossello referred to Melissa Mark-Viverito, the first Puerto Rican New York City Council speaker, as a “puta” (“whore”). He also wrote, “You would be doing me a big favor” when another described salivating to shoot San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz. She announced in March her plans to run against Rossello for governor in 2020. Legendary pop star Ricky Martin was also the target of crude homophobic comments.

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Puerto Ricans Demonstrate How to Oust a Corrupt Leader  



by Sonali Kolhatkar

The texts surfaced as Puerto Rico struggles through an immense debt crisis and debilitating austerity under the bankruptcy-like process imposed by the federal PROMESA law. Enacted three years ago, PROMESA created the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected body with sweeping powers to overrule Puerto Rican democratic control at any level.

On July 11, just two days before “RickyLeaks” broke, federal authorities arrested two top Rossello administration officials and others in what the Justice Department described as an extensive, multimillion dollar fraud scheme related to government contracts.

Puerto Ricans have long suffered as a result of their island’s colonial status, both at home and in the diaspora across the United States. Fifty years ago this week, a chapter of the revolutionary Puerto Rican group, the Young Lords, formed in New York City, to confront the injustices experienced by impoverished inner-city Latinos.

Juan Gonzalez, journalist and “Democracy Now!” news hour co-host, co-founded the Young Lords New York chapter. Born in Puerto Rico but raised in New York, he described the group’s history: “The conditions in the ghettos of East Harlem and the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn was what got us going. We constantly dealt with the direct issues confronting the community on a daily basis, whether it was garbage or health care or the lack of teaching of Puerto Rican and African-American histories in the schools.”

They barricaded streets until the city agreed to increase sanitation services. They took over a church to provide morning breakfast and child care for those who needed it. They hijacked a mobile health clinic van to provide medical care in underserved areas. Like most radical groups of that era, they also faced serious repression by the police and the FBI.

Over the past few weeks, as pressure mounted on Rossello to resign, Juan Gonzalez noted the significance of this moment: “Puerto Rico has a long history. In its 500 years of governance … there have been 286 governors. Never has a governor been forced to resign by a popular protest.”

But he also warned: “There’s going to be a real test now among the leaders and the activists of Puerto Rico. Can they unite? Can they come up with a political force, a leadership that is really accountable to the Puerto Rican people? And that’s going to be the big test in the future.”

Given that Puerto Rico’s secretary of state recently resigned, the next in line to replace Gov. Rossello is Wanda Vazquez, the island’s secretary of justice. As one of Rossello’s appointees, calls for her immediate resignation are already flooding social media.

Music has infused the protests. Among the musicians in the streets were Ricky Martin, and members of the globally renowned, Grammy-winning Puerto Rican band “Calle 13.” Band members Ileana Cabra Joglar, or iLe, her brother Rene, known as Residente, and reggaeton musician Bad Bunny released a song last week called “Afilando Los Cuchillos,” or “Sharpening the Knives.” It quickly became the anthem of the movement. Speaking on Democracy Now! Tuesday, one day after more than half a million people marched in San Juan, iLe described what the protests meant to her: “I’ve been waiting all my life for a moment like this.”

Pa’lante.

* * *

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan and David Goodman, of the New York Times best-seller “Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America.”

(c) 2019 Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

In Snub to Trump, California Signs Mileage Deal With Automakers

DETROIT—Four major automakers have reached a deal with California to increase gas mileage and greenhouse gas emissions standards, bypassing the Trump administration’s push to freeze requirements at 2021 levels.

Ford, BMW, Honda and Volkswagen signed the deal with the California Air Resources Board, the state’s air pollution regulator, which had been at odds with the Trump administration for months. California has said it would exercise its powers to set more stringent pollution and mileage standards than the federal government has proposed.

The Trump administration reacted angrily to the end run, with Environmental Protection Agency spokesman Michael Abboud calling it a “PR stunt” and charging that California regulators “continually refused to produce reasonable and responsible proposals.”

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Carbon Dioxide Levels Just Broke a 3-Million-Year-Old Record



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The administration has sought to freeze Obama administration standards, keeping fleetwide new-vehicle mileage at 2021 levels of about 30 mpg. The administration says the extra expense to comply with the requirements will raise the price of new cars, making them unaffordable and depriving buyers of new safety technology. Many experts, including former EPA engineers, challenge the administration’s safety assertion.

The administration also has threatened to challenge California’s ability to set its own standards.

In a statement Thursday, California regulators said their deal delays by one year the new-vehicle fuel efficiency requirements approved under the Obama administration for model years 2022 through 2025. That means the fleet of new vehicles would have to average around 36 miles per gallon in real-world driving by 2026. The deal also slightly slows the rate of growth in the early years “to provide additional lead time” for the auto industry, the statement said.

The four automakers see the California agreement as “insurance” to provide some certainty to the industry and the state no matter who wins the 2020 presidential elections, according to a person familiar with the talks who asked not to be identified because details of the negotiations haven’t been made public.

The four automakers represent only about 30% of U.S. new-vehicle sales.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents a dozen automakers in and out of the California deal, said in a statement that the industry still wants nationwide standards with year-over-year mileage increases that fit with what people are now buying, SUVs and trucks.

“Today’s announcement of the framework of an agreement by California and certain automakers acknowledges that the MY2022-2025 standards developed by the Obama administration are not attainable and need to be adjusted,” said the statement from the alliance.

Alan Baum, a Detroit-area consultant who does work for the auto industry and environmental groups, said the deal is clearly designed to get the rest of the auto industry on board and to force the Trump administration to the bargaining table with California.

“This really puts California in a much stronger position because this really puts some pressure on the federal government,” Baum said. “These four automakers don’t want to be out on an island here. They would like their competitors to do this as well.”

He said the deal could delay a final rule that’s supposed to come from the federal government in August or September, keeping the current standards in place longer. For the automakers, it’s not much different from how they were preparing to meet the Obama administration standards, he said.

Under the agreement, fuel economy and corresponding greenhouse gas emissions standards would rise by 3.7% per year starting with the 2022 model year, through 2026, according to the statement from the four automakers. They would have gone up by 4.7% per year through 2025 under the Obama standards, according to California.

Automakers could get 1 percentage point of the increase by using advanced technology credits such as those for hydrogen fuel cell, plug-in gas-electric hybrids, and battery electric vehicles. And they would get credits for devices that aren’t counted in EPA test cycles such as stopping the engine at red lights and restarting it quickly when the driver wants to go. The process would be streamlined to get credits approved for new technologies.

The automakers also agreed to recognize California’s authority to set its own standards, which are followed by at least a dozen other states, and they will not challenge the state’s authority, according to the statement.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which draws up federal standards with the EPA, said the government continues to work on a final fuel economy rule that will apply to all automakers. The administration’s proposals do not prevent any automaker from designing and building highly fuel-efficient vehicles, the agency said in a statement.

The four automakers came to California with the proposal, and the Air Resources Board hopes other companies will join them, Chairwoman Mary Nichols said Thursday. The state is reaching out to other automakers, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said.

“We can have a single vehicle fleet regardless of what Trump does,” Newsom said.

Some environmental groups like the Sierra Club praised the agreement, saying it shows that California won’t stand by while the Trump administration tries to lower standards for carbon pollution.

But Dan Becker of the Safe Climate Campaign said the deal has so many loopholes for automakers that it will cut in half the fuel efficiency and pollution improvements under the Obama-era standards.

____

Kathleen Ronayne contributed from Sacramento, California. Knickmeyer reported from Washington.

A Century Later, Attacks by Whites in Arkansas Come Back Into Focus

ELAINE, Ark.—J. Chester Johnson never heard about the mass killing of black people in Elaine, a couple hours away from where he grew up in Arkansas. Nobody talked about it, teachers didn’t mention it in history classes, and only the elderly remembered the bloodshed of 1919.

He was an adult when he found out about it. By then, his grandfather, Alonzo “Lonnie” Birch, was dead — perhaps taking a secret to his grave.

Johnson believes Birch took part in the Elaine massacre. And now he’s bent on telling the story of one of the largest racial mass killings in U.S. history, an infamous chapter in the “Red Summer” riots that spread in cities and towns across the nation.

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“I feel an obligation,” said Johnson, who is white. “It’s hard to grow up in a severely segregated environment and for it not to affect you. If you don’t face it and deal with it in various ways, it becomes undiscovered.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Hundreds of African Americans died at the hands of white mob violence during “Red Summer” but little is widely known about this spate of violence a century later. As part of its coverage of the 100th anniversary of Red Summer, AP will take a multiplatform look at the attacks and the communities where they occurred. https://www.apnews.com/RedSummer

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Johnson, who now lives in New York City, is co-chair of a committee overseeing construction of a memorial honoring those killed in 1919. He and others are hoping the structure, being built in a park across from the Phillips County Courthouse about a half-hour drive from Elaine, will bring attention to the massacre. Others say plans for a monument are a folly — starting with its location — and want commemoration efforts to focus instead on reparations to account for what they say was theft of black-owned land in the wake of the killings.

“It was literally a war on this area. People wanted the property that was almost all black-owned,” said Mary Olson, who is white. She is president of the Elaine Legacy Center, a red-brick community center that works to preserve the area’s civil rights history. It bears the sign, “Motherland of Civil Rights.”

The violence unfolded on the evening of Sept. 30, 1919, as black sharecroppers had gathered at a small church in Hoop Spur, an unincorporated area about 2½ miles north of Elaine. The sharecroppers, wanting to be paid better and treated more fairly, were meeting with union organizers when a deputy sheriff and a railroad security officer — both white — arrived.

Fighting and gunfire erupted, though it’s still not clear who shot first. The security officer was killed and the deputy wounded.

White men frustrated that the sharecroppers were organizing went on a rampage. Over several days, mobs from the surrounding area and neighboring states killed men, women and children.

More than 200 black men, women and children were killed, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery, Alabama-based nonprofit that has documented more than 4,400 lynchings of black people in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. Five white people were killed. Hundreds of black people were arrested and jailed, many of them tortured into giving incriminating testimony. Some were forced to flee Arkansas and, according to the Legacy Center, had their land stolen.

Johnson said his grandfather, Alonzo “Lonnie” Birch, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, the same company that employed the railroad security officer who was killed at the Arkansas church where the black sharecroppers had gathered to organize. Once the violence started, Johnson said, railroad officials urged workers to join the fighting. He said his grandfather likely responded to the call.

Narratives about the killings differ and records are not easy to find, said Brian Mitchell, an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. “You have to understand that everybody that had some degree of power in the state was a part of the process of the massacre, so the people who would control all the records are actively suppressing the records,” Mitchell said.

Some residents think the death toll is highly exaggerated.

Poindexter Fiser, the mayor of Elaine from 1985 to 2007, said the accounts of a massacre are “somebody trying to make something out of nothing much to talk about.” Fiser, who is white, said his late father-in-law put the number of those slain at only “about 25 people.”

Kyle Miller, director of the Delta Cultural Center in Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, said for many years, the violence “was not really acknowledged … it was something that was only talked about behind closed doors.” Miller is a descendant of the Johnston brothers, four wealthy, black siblings who he said were pulled off a train on their way back to Helena after a hunting trip and killed during the massacre.

“I’m really hoping (the memorial) is going to spark some conversations. That people will look at it and begin to ask questions and be able to learn some history of our community,” Miller said.

The memorial is set to be unveiled in September.

Not everyone supports it. Members of the Legacy Center say the monument belongs in Elaine.

“If you said ’1919,′ what do you think of? Elaine,” said James White, director of the Legacy Center. “You don’t think of Helena.”

White and others with the center said any commemoration efforts should have some focus on the theft of black-owned land. Some residents are calling for descendants of the victims to receive compensation for what their families lost.

Miller and other memorial organizers say Elaine doesn’t have enough resources to sustain what they envision will become a civil rights tourist destination. And to them, the massacre story is bigger than Elaine: The Phillips County Courthouse in Helena was where hundreds of black men were jailed and tortured following the violence.

The effects of the violence and aftermath endure today. Elaine is still highly segregated: White residents live predominantly on the south side and black residents on the north side. About 60 percent of its 527 people are black.

“It’s a quiet town, but there’s still racial tension here because we’re still divided,” said White, a black Elaine native whose grandmother told him about black residents hiding in swamps to escape.

White said he welcomes efforts to learn about the massacre but questions who gets to tell the story and who benefits from sharing it.

“One hundred years later, it’s the same old game, just a different day,” he said, reflecting on the disparity between those that hold power in Phillips County and the poor black residents of Elaine. “It’s hate in this town … and black people are still afraid” of talking about the massacre.

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Associated Press writer Ken Miller in Oklahoma City contributed.